Like trust falls from towers
by kinosternon
Summary: A collection of S1 drabbles based on randomly selected pairs of characters and one-word prompts, focusing mainly on the team getting gradually closer to one another.
1. Trifler (Hunk & Allura)

"Hunk?"

Hunk was definitely not used to hearing Allura calling his name like that—like she wanted to _talk_ to him, not just issue orders. And he wasn't entirely sure he was comfortable with it, either.

Shiro talked to him, sometimes. That was fine—he was the team leader. Lance talked to him. Even _Pidge_ talked to him now, since they spent a decent amount of their free time collaborating. It stayed mostly work-based, sure—with a generous side helping on Pidge's end of _don't touch my stuff_ —but still, the younger paladin showed much more interest in Hunk than had been the case back at the Garrison. Keith…wasn't much of one for talking, and Hunk could respect that.

After Lance and Pidge, he actually talked the most often to Coran. The guy talked more _at_ Team Voltron than he did _to_ them, but he was friendly, and more importantly, he knew the castle-ship upside-down and backwards. Hunk had to spend most of his time training, but in his free time, when he wasn't watching Pidge learn the ship's computers from the ground up, he was following Coran, helping with general upkeep and picking up whatever random information the man saw fit to share. Coran was perfectly content just being listened to most of the time, and Hunk didn't mind the chatter. He didn't want to be roped into chores _too_ often, but he had to admit that he learned a lot, too. Coran was very good at what he did.

Allura, though? Most of the time, the only person who talked to her directly was Shiro. So, yeah, he might be kind of nervous as a person, but as far as he was concerned, he was justified in being a _little_ nervous about Allura talking to him. "…Yes, Princess?"

"This might sound like sort of a strange question, but…have you been in the AI chamber recently?"

Oh. Oh, dear.

He winced. "Uh…yeah?"

"I'm not mad," she hurried to assure him, "just…I wasn't really expecting anyone to go in there. There isn't much to see anymore, after all."

"Right. I…" This was what he got for sticking his nose in _everything_ , Hunk thought morosely. "I just…look, I don't really have a good reason, I'm sorry to pry—"

"It isn't really prying," Allura said softly. "It's all right, Hunk. Thanks for cleaning up the shards."

"You're welcome," Hunk said automatically. "I just thought it'd be a little dangerous, you know, like what if someone fell in there and got cut or something? Or a torn suit—that could be _really dangerous_ if it went unnoticed, and—"

"I understand," she reassured him. "I just wanted to check, that's all. I'm glad that you take looking after the ship so seriously."

"Of course I take it seriously," Hunk said, shrugging. "It's kind of our home now."

"I'm glad you feel that way."

Allura smiled sadly at him before turning to leave, and then somehow something else slipped out of his mouth before he had a chance to think about it. "Princess…"

She turned back, surprised.

"Look, it's probably none of my business, but…" Hunk forced himself to pause. Deep breath in, deep breath out; this was the sort of thing that was worth saying slowly. "I'm sorry about your father. I can't imagine how hard that must have been for you."

The look that flitted across the princess's face was…complicated, Hunk decided. Like she wanted to be polite, or happy that he cared, but she couldn't quite manage to be either of those things just yet. He fought back a wince of sympathy.

"Thank you, Hunk," she murmured. "It…hasn't been easy."

"Is there anything we can do?" he asked. "Like…I don't know what sort of traditions Altea has, but if it would help to do something in his memory…?"

"I have all the memories I need in here," she said, resting a finger lightly on her temple. "I've already made my peace with my father's passing."

"Okay," he said, nodding. "But if you ever need someone to talk to, we're all here for you, Princess." He was a little intimidated to talk to Allura, sure, but she was part of the team—a precious, irreplaceable part. If talking with her more often would help, he'd get over his nervousness.

He thought her eyes were a bit glossier than normal for a second, but then she blinked and the moment was gone. "I know," she said, and disappeared back the way she'd come.


	2. Subsist (Shiro & Allura)

Shiro didn't like to spend too much time in his room at night. When he turned in, he forced himself to stay put, even if he couldn't bring himself to rest. But until that time came, he tended to stay outside his room as much as possible, choosing instead to wander the castle-ship's corridors. He didn't want to grow to hate his one private space in the ship just because he spent too much time there waiting for nightmares.

Besides, keeping up an evening patrol seemed important, somehow. After all, once the ship could easily have supported hundreds. It was a testament to the genius of Altean design that Coran was able to keep it running by himself. And it was a chance for Shiro to familiarize himself with his new home.

He wasn't the only nighttime wanderer, he knew. Lance was typically a little spooked by the castle, and didn't usually go out of his way to spend time by himself. Pidge was usually occupied by specific projects, but would occasionally hide away in the most obscure and inaccessible of corners, especially when upset. Hunk investigated just about everything, but he was more likely to go missing during the daylight hours, when he could call for backup if he got into a bind. Keith spent most of his spare time in the training hall, and moreover was a creature of habit: he had his preferred routes through the castle, the ones he'd deemed most efficient, and he took those few routes to get just about everywhere.

But he wasn't even sure how much their Altean friends even needed to sleep, and he'd come across them at all hours. Coran was all over the ship so frequently that finding him in-person was virtually impossible. And Allura…

Well. She spent less time in her virtual reality havens, now. He wasn't sure if they even still worked, after everything. He hadn't gotten around to asking.

Whenever the paladins went looking for her during the day, she was usually in the main control room, keeping an eye on the readouts and chatting with Coran remotely. But at night, when she thought no one was looking for her…she wandered sometimes, too.

That said, they didn't really talk much, the few times they happened to stumble across each other. Usually they just joined formation and continued on. Sometimes, on better nights, she'd tell him a story about the ship, and adventure she'd had while aboard or a humorous malfunction. Sometimes when the silence grew too much for him, he'd tell her a story from the Garrison, or about the latest mishaps the rest of the team had gotten into when they thought neither of them was looking. She seemed to appreciate a bit of quiet levity, those nights.

He wondered if the castle seemed as painfully lonely to her as it did to him. He'd always liked being around people, the more the better, and better still if they were people he could really talk to. But this castle was close to empty now, every dusty shadow etched in loneliness, and the hearts inside were stretched to their limits, too. More than half of the current crew were barely more than children, stuck as desperate stopgap measures against near-impossible odds. He and Allura and Coran were the only adults (he knew he barely counted, but he _had_ to count) and each of them had lost so much, with little or no time to recover. They, along with the castle, were struggling to get by, and what little equilibrium they'd gained was too tenuous to risk by reaching out carelessly.

But perhaps if he offered his hand, one of those nights, she might take it. And from there, who knew? Maybe they could start to push back against the loneliness, one quiet hallway at a time.


	3. Reporting (Allura & Keith)

"What _exactly_ did you think you were doing?"

Keith stared down at his feet. He'd kind of hoped, with all that had happened with the failed wormhole and the fact that they'd barely escaped Zarkon with everyone on the team intact, that Allura might have overlooked this.

Instead, it seemed she'd only been waiting for things to settle back into routine. She'd found him in the break room in the others, and promptly begun lecturing them about how ill-advised their mission to rescue her had been.

Which he'd _known_ , and tried to tell the others, but now really didn't seem like the time to bring that up. Not when she'd only _really_ started getting angry when she got to the "attacking Zarkon one-on-one" part.

"What we were doing was already crazy," he said, before he could lose his nerve. "Zarkon had almost gotten the black lion once, but he wasn't inside her yet. He was alone, without any soldiers. Nobody else was going to get the opening I had. It might've been our best chance of ending him."

 _And I failed_ , he didn't say. That wasn't the point, and they all knew it already.

"You could have gotten yourself _killed_ ," she snapped.

"He almost did," Shiro cut in. Keith shot him an irritated glance before he could stop himself. But Shiro just sounded grave, not spiteful. "Keith, if I hadn't been able to get you out of there…"

"It would've been worth it," Keith insisted. "Look. Tactically speaking, we never should've gone near Zarkon in the first place. I don't see how you can say that _that_ was okay, and then get mad at me for what _I_ did!"

Allura's face twisted—because he had a _point_ —but Shiro cut in. "We went in there to save a member of our team," he said bluntly. "If we'd saved Allura only to lose you, it wouldn't have been worth it. The mission would have been a failure."

Which—sure, that made a kind of sense, in its own way. But it was also ridiculous. " _We could have won!_ " Keith shouted. "Right then! I had to try!"

"No, you didn't," Allura said seriously. "And if the chance comes again, you take it with the rest of your team, or not at all. Understood?"

He waited, fuming. Sure, maybe the rest of them weren't willing to put their lives on the line when it was important, and sure, that was their decision. He was…

…He was a member of Team Voltron.

He took a deep breath.

Shiro spoke softly, echoing his thoughts. "There are too few of us to risk anyone in a gamble, Keith. We look out for each other, and we make the big calls as a team. Okay?"

He took another second to swallow back the last of his bitter pride. Then he looked from Shiro to Allura, and nodded. "Understood."


	4. Cuddling (Shiro & Coran)

"Nope. Not doing that."

"Come on, paladin! A bit of manly snuggling never hurt anyone!"

"Seriously? No."

Any of the others would've backed down by now, but Coran was stubborn. He set down his massive pile of blankets in a convenient corner and put his hands on his hips. "Look," he said. "This might be the last time we get to spend outside the castle for a while, and you don't wanna miss the view of the Arusian sunset from the parapets!"

Sometimes Shiro felt like the only responsible adult in this place. Where was Allura when he needed her? "So we are going to be taking off soon?"

"Yes, of course," Coran waved the question off, impatient. "It's an ancient paladin tradition that the pilots gather together to enjoy their final evening on a planet before leaving, especially if they don't know when—or if!—they'll return."

Shiro was eighty-percent certain that Coran made that up on the spot. He resisted the urge to groan. "Our last try at a party didn't go so well. Besides, somehow I doubt that _ancient paladin tradition_ includes a 'cuddle pile.'"

"So? You Earthlings are susceptible to low temperatures. We're going to be very high up!" Coran picked up half of the blankets, nudging the other half towards Shiro with one foot. "Besides, star maps can only tell you so much. I thought you might like to see a little bit of where we're headed before we set off."

Shiro considered that. Put that way, it sounded a lot less undignified and a bit more practical. Always good to get to know the neighborhood, right? And it might be their last chance for fresh air in a while…

Yeah, he was getting talked into it. Sighing, Shiro picked up his half of the blankets. "If we're really doing this, you should let Hunk know. He'll probably want to be in charge of snacks."

He could tell that stung Coran's pride a little, but Coran stayed enthusiastic. "Of course! He'll be the next person I tell!"

"And the princess?" Shiro asked.

"Gave her permission immediately," Coran said, nodding proudly. "She said she thought it was a good idea—a valuable bonding experience for our new team."

And, well, Shiro reflected, maybe it would be. They'd been through a lot, what with Pidge's near-defection, Lance's injury, and his and Lance's capture. It might prove tough at first to wrangle them all into being within touching distance of each other, but it'd probably be good for them in the long run.

"All right, then," he said to himself, following Coran towards what would prove to be a truly ridiculous number of stairs. "I guess we _are_ doing this."


	5. Heckling (Allura & Pidge)

"Woohoo! _Yeah!_ Get'em, Allura!"

Allura wiped her brow, more for show than anything, and took a chance to wave back at Pidge, who had both hands up, waving energetically. They hardly looked ill anymore, but after the recent mishap, the rest of the group was taking no chances. Pidge didn't seem to mind sitting this one out and watching them all train instead. They had their arm-screen up to fiddle with their most recent coding project, but were ignoring it in favor of laughing at the team's multiple defeats.

Allura probably wouldn't have agreed to this particular training exercise if Pidge hadn't egged her on, she reflected. The Voltron paladins already respected her as their leader; she didn't need to prove anything to them, and she didn't want to damage their trust by injuring them accidentally.

That said, she supposed they were doing fairly well for themselves. It was hard to judge their progress when she didn't know much about humans as a species, but they seemed to be improving fairly steadily now. Certainly their falling had gotten better; they handled being thrown across the training room quite well, and they didn't look discouraged when it happened anymore.

…She missed having other aliens around, she reflected as she waited for them to rush her again. At least when she'd briefly impersonated a Galra officer, she'd gotten to be _big_. Alteans were shapeshifters and diplomats, and ten thousand years ago she'd enjoyed changing her form to meet different people. There was no reason to do that here, with how closely humans resembled Alteans' spacegoing forms, but…well, she'd always been the daughter of the king, but she suspected that maybe "princess" meant something more to the rest of the team than just that. Something that perhaps explained why they expected her to stay in the castle _all_ the time, and leave the fighting to them.

Perhaps this training exercise was a good idea after all, just to be sure they didn't have any lingering illusions about her combat ability.

They'd started getting a form together, she noted. Shiro would hang back a little, looking for an opening to exploit. Hunk stayed to one side, ready to dive in if someone looked like they could use a block or a distraction. Lance wasn't the sort to get very invested in strategy, especially at first, and Keith had a habit of trying out half-baked ideas as soon as he thought he saw an opening…

She faded a few steps back, waiting to see what they would do, and Keith and Lance rushed her.

Keith ducked in ahead of Lance to try to get a strike in, and she took him by one arm and casually flipped him into the blue paladin. The two of them crashed between Shiro and Hunk, who each sidestepped in a different direction to avoid the collision.

Hunk pulled Lance up, the blue paladin grinning sheepishly, and Shiro exchanged a glance with Keith as the red paladin rolled to one knee, getting ready to lunge in low.

"You got this, guys!" Pidge yelled, abruptly switching sides. "Keep it up! Work together!"

As they regrouped, Allura spared a glance up at the training center's control booth, where Coran was keeping an eye on them. He looked extremely entertained.

She grinned and winked at him, wondering if next time she could convince him to join in.

* * *

 **A/N: Pidge's fine, by the way—I just needed a reason for them to be sitting out a practice.**

 **Also, between Coran's descriptions of life on Altea and Allura's mention of the combat abilities of Altean children, it seems pretty unlikely to me that the way they appear in the show is the original Altean form. Just putting that out there.**


	6. Dispassionately (Keith & Lance)

Lance was jealous of Keith. As far as Keith cared to guess, that wasn't unusual. What was strange was how _obvious_ he was about it.

Keith didn't spend much time worrying about what other people were thinking. Misreading someone was worse than making no assumptions at all, and if someone wanted him to know something, all they had to do was tell him. One way in which he thought he was different from other people was that he _listened_ when people talked to him—no games of round-and-round, guess-the-subtext-from-my-facial-expression. He sucked at reading people, just like they sucked at reading him, so he usually didn't bother trying. The one aura he knew he could give off was "shut up and leave me alone." It wasn't even intentional some of the time, but it was definitely effective.

But sometimes, Lance was pretty easy to read even for Keith. And usually, every sign he gave off at those times said "jealous."

Keith didn't get it, not really. Sure, he was smarter and faster than Lance, but Keith was smarter and faster than a lot of people. And Lance, from what he vaguely remembered of his academic performance, was pretty average—he had no reason to take Keith's successes personally. Besides, Keith had washed out, hadn't he? When they'd met rescuing Shiro, Lance had had a team, and Keith hadn't.

If push came to shove, Lance would _still_ have a team, and Keith wouldn't. He tried not to think about it too hard, tried to put his efforts into being the best paladin he could be to make up the difference on his mediocre teamwork, but it was true.

And the blue lion, the one that had dragged them all into this whole Voltron mess in the first place, had ignored Keith completely. He'd been out there in the desert, trying to figure out what was going on, for _months_. And the blue lion had just sat patiently and waited for someone better. Keith had helped the rest of the team to find her, sure, but between Pidge and Hunk, and possibly Shiro, they probably could have gotten there on their own. And Lance was the one who'd taken them off-planet.

It had taken Keith getting blown out of an airlock for his lion to even deign to notice him, and all Lance had needed to do was knock.


	7. Obedient (Keith & Shiro)

"Shiro…what happened back there?"

Shiro, who'd been lounging in his bunk with his hands behind his head, turned his head to see Keith lurking in his open doorway, waiting to be allowed in.

He sat up and gestured to the other end of the bed, watching as Keith perched there. "What was what?"

"With Sendak. What was that?"

"Skittish" was not a word Shiro would typically use to describe Keith, but it was the way he looked now. All it would take was a dark look to send him off without an answer, and Shiro had to admit that a part of him was tempted.

Well, he could do that later if he really needed to. For now, he took a deep breath.

"He…Sendak was messing with my head," he admitted. "I realize now that he was doing the same sort of sabotage he was with the rest of the ship. He must have found some sort of speaker system. But I didn't realize that then."

Keith nodded, eyes intent. "So?"

"Well, we know the ship interfaces with our brains for the sake of translation—you remember when Pidge figured that out?—and I thought, maybe he'd gotten to me. Maybe I was compromised. So I panicked."

"It was the right call," Keith said. "Between Sendak and the Galra crystal, the entire ship was in danger. If you hadn't gotten rid of him, things could've gotten a lot worse."

"You're right." Shiro started to sigh, turned it into a cough. "I just wish I'd done it for better reasons."

"Because Sendak got to you," Keith said, carefully.

"Yeah."

"I…" Keith began, then shook his head, looking frustrated.

Keith's concern for him had never completely gone away, Shiro knew. It had been there when he'd woken up for the first time in Keith's house in the desert, and again when Keith had saved Shiro the first time they'd tried out training room. He never pushed beyond the moment of crisis, always backing off, banking his worry like a fire, keeping it to within reasonable levels. Keith was all about control, and sometimes—like now—it sabotaged him when he wanted to say something important.

Shiro couldn't respond until he knew what Keith was trying to say, but that was fine. He was happy to wait.

"Shiro. Are you okay?"

Keith said it so firmly it was more of a statement than a question, and suddenly, any chance that Keith was going to take it back had vanished. Shiro knew why he'd been tracked down privately for this—it was impersonal and not particularly friendly, but it was also a kind of insubordination. And one thing that Keith never, ever did was question Shiro's leadership.

As much as he needed Keith's respect—wrangling teenagers wasn't easy, especially against the impossible odds they faced—it was a bit of a shame. It made it hard for him and Keith to be friends.

"…Yeah," he said, when he was sure he could mean it. Keith's stare didn't falter, so he elaborated. "I'm not happy to have a weak spot, but now that Sendak's exploited it, I know it's there. It's something to work on."

Keith considered that, brow furrowed. "That's a good point," he said finally. "I hadn't thought about it that way." He stood up, having apparently decided that his allotted time in Shiro's room was over. Keith never was the type to risk overstaying his welcome. "I'm gonna go train. Want to come?" The words weren't flippant, and it was clear Keith hadn't put the matter out of his mind entirely, but he was clearly through talking about it.

"Sure." After all, there was still some time before lights-out, and maybe some exercise would burn the last of his jitters away.


	8. Sluice (Lance & Shiro)

Morning in the desert was a pretty impressive sight, even if Lance could only see a small part of it through the window. The stars he'd been watching had gone out one by one, the sky gradually lightening to a brighter blue. The sun wasn't even over the horizon yet, but he could already see most of the desert in relief, the shadows growing gradually sharper.

He, Hunk, and Pidge had taken turns watching over Shiro through the night. Keith had left as soon as they'd gotten Shiro settled, saying something about laying a false trail for the Garrison. He wasn't back yet—not that Lance cared what happened to him or anything, except he kinda did, since Keith was the only person who knew where they were in the middle of this desert. He was also the one with the bike, or speeder, or whatever the heck that thing had been. Without that, Lance wasn't sure how they were going to get back.

He wasn't sure they _should_ go back, and that was an even bigger problem. Any moment now, the instructors back at the Galaxy Garrison were going to realize that he, Hunk, and Pidge were missing. Or they were going to review the security footage from their rescue of Shiro—Pidge had tried to wreck it, but there was no way of knowing if that had worked. Or one of the people who'd chased them last night had already recognized them, and they were already doomed.

Either way, when they'd rescued Shiro, they'd joined Keith as washouts…but depending on what Shiro might know, even that might not matter. Which was the biggest problem, probably. There were so many he was starting to lose track.

Pidge had taken first watch, and Hunk had relieved Pidge. He'd told Lance when he'd shaken him awake a few hours earlier that it seemed like Shiro had had a nightmare in the middle of the night. "I thought he'd wake up, but he didn't," Hunk had mumbled. "Seemed okay otherwise. Good luck."

And with that, Hunk had wedged himself into a corner by the couch and zonked out almost immediately, and Lance had taken over watching. Not that there'd been much of anything _to_ watch—Shiro's breathing was quiet and even, and other than that he was totally still. Lance had given him a once-over every few minutes, trying not to linger on the metal arm, but other than that he'd stayed busy looking out the window.

So when Shiro did wake up, Lance had barely any warning.

"Whoa!" he yelped, jerking out of the way as suddenly Shiro was upright. He stayed still for a long moment, panting, eyes darting everywhere. They started on Pidge, who was blinking sleepily at him, then roved over Hunk, who'd jumped about a foot in the air and then started burrowing even further out of the way. His gaze finally landed on Lance, who'd half-fallen against the arm of the couch in surprise.

Lance didn't like the way Shiro's right arm was angled, like it was poised for an attack that could cut right through him.

"Hey," Lance said weakly. "Shiro. It's okay. Nobody's gonna hurt you."

"Where am I?" Shiro demanded. "What happened?"

"We rescued you," Lance said, keeping his voice as steady as he could. "The Garrison drugged you—you remember that, right? They weren't listening to you. So we snuck in and got you out while they were distracted."

Shiro's eyes narrowed. "Distracted by what?"

"Keith rigged some explosions," Lance said, dismissive. Why focus on details? "It's not important. What's important is that you're here now, and you're gonna tell us about the _aliens_."

"And about what happened on the Kerberos mission," Pidge added, determined. Lance blinked, and Shiro turned briefly to look Pidge over again. His stance was gradually relaxing, and Lance felt his own breathing get easier.

Shiro hesitated, looking between the three of them. "Keith…Kerberos…" He sighed and stood up straight, rubbing at his forehead. He stopped after a second and looked down at his metal hand, as though surprised. "Sorry. This is a lot to take in."

"Take your time," Lance said. "Everything's okay. …For the moment, at least."

He got a slight chuckle for that one, as Shiro looked around. "Is this Keith's house?"

"Apparently."

"Huh." There wasn't much to see—the sheet covering most of one wall, with some old tech on a shelf Hunk had already dug around in. Some old-fashioned furniture, a kitchenette to one side, and that was about it. Shiro seemed to have realized the same thing. "I'm going to take a look around outside—if it's safe?"

"Sure, go ahead," Lance agreed. "We're in the middle of nowhere. Just let us know if you need anything."

"Yeah."

Shiro left, and the three of them stared at each other.

Hunk sighed and flopped back dramatically against the wall. "Man, did you see that? He went all 'martial arts' for a second there."

"He must've been pretty freaked out," Lance said. "Can't blame him."

"Yeah." Pidge was still staring after Shiro through the window, but then shifted and blinked. "Oh. Keith's back."

A minute later, the door opened, proving Pidge right. "Hey," Keith said, calm as a…well, calmer than he should have been.

"'Hey' nothing," he snapped. "What took you so long?"

"Like I said, I was laying some trails. We just stole a high-security secret right out from under them. They're looking pretty hard for us." He smirked slightly. "But I don't think they're going to have much luck anytime soon."

"Oh. Well, that's good," Hunk offered. Pidge just shrugged and kept staring out the window.

The amusement faded from Keith's face. "Anyway. I saw Shiro outside. How is he?"

"Dunno. I think he wants to clear his head or something." Lance shrugged. "You might wanna give him some space, dude. If last night was weird for us, it must've been super weird for him."

"Yeah. I'll…keep that in mind." But Keith still left, closing the door behind him.


	9. Hold (Hunk & Keith)

"Agh! Hunk, what are you _doing_?"

"I'm giving you a hug, Keith."

" _Why_?"

"Uh, because you need hugs? Seriously, it's been a while since I've seen someone more in need of hugs."

"What are you talking about? I don't need _hugs_ , I need my personal space!"

"Well, sure. If you really don't like being touched, I won't do it. But you don't flinch or anything—you just seem like you don't get what I'm doing."

"Because I don't! It doesn't scare me, it just seems pointless. I'm too old for hugs."

"Dude. _Nobody_ is too old for hugs. And physical contact is an important psychological need. Didn't you take any psych units at the Garrison?"

"No, I didn't. It's not really my thing."

"Why am I not surprised? But seriously. If we had pets or something around here, I would let this go, but we don't. Humans are _social animals_ , Keith. That includes physical contact."

"From you?"

"Sure. I'm your team member. And who else are you gonna hug? Lance? Shiro? Pidge? Coran might actually break something if he hugged you, I've had to warn him about that once or twice. And I could see why you might be a little uncomfortable hugging the princess—"

"Okay, okay, I get it! You've made your point. Mostly."

"See? Wait, what do you mean, 'mostly'?"

"I don't need hugs, Hunk. I don't know where you're getting that from."

"Really? They don't do anything for you at all?"

" _No!_ "

"…Oh. Okay."

"…What?"

"Okay. I'll leave you alone, I guess. I really was trying to help, but if it isn't helping…"

"Why are you—"

"No, seriously, don't worry about it. I get the message. I'll stop…whoa! What are you doing?"

"Hunk, just shut up and hug me."

"Okay?"

"I'm not making a habit out of this. Just do me a favor—when _you're_ the one that wants a hug, don't beat around the bush. Just say so."

"You…really don't mind?"

"No."

"Okay, sure, dude. …And Keith?"

"Yeah?"

"Thanks."


	10. Militancy (Lance & Pidge)

"No, left! _Left!_ " Lance's voice grew increasingly shrill as the blasts started coming more quickly. "You're the left arm, Pidge! You should know which way left is!"

"I _know_ already!" Pidge, on the other hand, sounded like they were trying to cover up their nerves with anger. "Will you stop foot-seat driving? It's not helping!"

" _Foot-_ seat—argh!"

Shiro had felt the explosion a split-second before Lance, as the impact of the blast rattled through Voltron's left arm and set the rest of the mech shaking.

"There, see! I _told_ you!" Lance exclaimed. And that was…okay, he was going to need to get involved in this, before things got nasty.

"Shut up, okay?! I—"

"Pidge! Lance! Calm down." Shiro muted himself on the team comm as the two paladins' complaints started pouring in, and opened a private comm channel to Allura on top of it. "Can you pause the drill for a minute?" he asked. "I need to deal with this."

"Of course." Allura looked a little confused, but lately she'd gotten a little more used to following Shiro's lead in situations like this. The bombardments from the castle-ship stopped, and he closed the private channel.

Meanwhile, Pidge had started ranting. "I get it. You're a _leg_ now. Some of the stuff you have to do isn't as _complicated_ , so you think you can spend your free time bossing me around—"

"Pidge."

"—uh. Yeah, Shiro?"

"Stop that. Every part of Voltron is important, and I don't want to hear any of you implying otherwise."

"…Yessir. Sorry."

"As long as you understand. Now, Lance."

He thought he heard a suppressed gulp on the other end of the comm, though that might have been Hunk. "Yes?"

"I know you were in charge of your team at the Garrison. I know that Pidge is younger than you and wasn't a pilot before getting the green lion. And I suspect you're probably just trying to help. Am I right?"

"Yes…" Lance already sounded resigned, like he knew where this was going.

"I can appreciate the sentiment, and I'm sure Pidge does, too. But there are some things that every pilot has to learn on their own, even while we're training as a team. Each of us is going to face their own unique challenges, and sometimes all the rest of us will be able to do is sit back and trust them. That's something to work on during these drills, too. Got it, Lance?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Everyone else?"

A chorus of agreement.

"Excellent." He added Allura to the team channel this time. "All right, Allura, get us back where we left off."


	11. Ouch (Lance & Hunk)

_Pop-tumble-flump_.

Hunk sat in place where he'd landed after his roll, briefly stunned. What had just happened?

 _He'd_ made that sound. His shoulder, specifically—but joints popped all the time, especially his. Why had it felt different this time?

"Hunk?" And that was Keith, who had been getting ready to throw Lance next, but had stopped because Hunk was in the way. "You getting up?"

"Yeah, sure." And he did—his shoulder felt wrong somehow when he moved it, but he got up and backed away until he hit the wall. He slid down it and curled up, careful not to move the shoulder again.

He was still staring at nothing, and he didn't quite know why. He tried to refocus on what Keith and Lance were doing, but his eyes weren't cooperating.

Lance, though, had stepped away from Keith, following him. "Hey, man. You okay?"

Oops. Hunk blinked himself back to normal and nodded, trying to look dismissive. "I'm good. Just took a weird fall, that's all."

"Oookay, no. You're hurt." Lance took a knee like this was something serious, and started looking Hunk over. "Where? Head? Neck?"

"I think I kinda landed on my shoulder." Hunk lifted it to demonstrate; it wasn't painful, exactly, but it felt like it might get there soon. Right now it just felt strange—a bit hot, too tight and too loose at the same time. "It's no big deal, it just surprised me. Maybe it just needs to be stretched out?"

Lance nodded, firm. "That sounds like the exact opposite of a good idea. Up."

Hunk stood with Lance's help, as his friend tilted back to a ridiculous angle to counterbalance some of his weight. Then what Lance had said caught up to him. "…Wait, what?"

"Any trouble down there, paladins?" Coran, who'd been observing their progress from the observation deck, had apparently turned his attention from Pidge and Shiro's sparring.

"No, it's okay—" Hunk started.

"Do you guys have anything less extreme than regeneration pods?" Lance said. "Hunk thinks he messed up his shoulder somehow."

"I'll have something down right away!" Coran said, enthusiastic as always, before disappearing to who-knew-where.

"Ugh, why'd you have to do that?" Hunk fussed, as Lance leaned him against the wall. It was cool enough that it felt good on his shoulder, even through his training suit. "He's gonna find out there's nothing wrong, and he's gonna laugh at me."

"No, he's not," Lance said, insistent. "Hunk, I know you. The only time you stop thinking there's something wrong with you is when there actually is."

"Yeah, well…" It sounded like exactly the sort of unhelpful thing that Lance would say, but Hunk knew Lance, too, and Lance had a track record of being right about the weirdest things. "Maybe I just need to work through it," he tried.

"My cousin messed up his elbow when he was still in high school. He never rested it, and it got so bad he ended up having to drop out of college sports." Lance saw Hunk gulp, and gave him a reassuring smile. "Don't worry, you're gonna be fine. My point is that you gotta catch these things early—take 'em seriously."

"If you say so? You're not really making me feel any better."

Lance nudged his good side with an elbow, jerking his head towards Coran, who'd come through the door carrying an improbably large variety of what looked like torture gear, but was probably some form of Altean medical equipment. Lance, the traitor, was starting to smirk already. "Don't worry—that's gonna be Coran's job."


	12. Application (Keith & Coran)

"You spend too much time down here by yourself, number four."

Keith had just been knocked down for the fifth time in a three minutes on the second level of the fight simulator when, instead of moving forward to press its advantage, the training robot had suddenly stopped, arms and head dangling like those of a puppet with cut strings.

 _Great. Did it lock me out somehow, or was that Coran?_

Coran continued toward him from the door, blithely ignoring his glare. "You know, if you put even a smidge of that enthusiasm toward getting to know your teammates, you'd be surprised what you might get out of it."

"They wouldn't want me to do that," Keith snapped.

"How would you know if you've never tried?"

"People usually don't." Partly because of moments like this one. He wasn't angry at Coran, not really—he was frustrated because he'd been stuck at level two for so long he was sure he'd hit a plateau. Keith shot a glare at the deactivated android. "I usually don't want to, either," he added, in an attempt at honesty.

"Ah." Coran looked the android over himself. "Well, I can hardly argue with that—except to point out that it's also very important to bond with one's teammates."

"How am I supposed to do that?" Thinking about trying made him want to hit more things, but he doubted the program would humor him if Coran didn't want it to. "Look. It's not like I dislike the others. We make a pretty good team when we've formed Voltron. But when we're not fighting together, we just don't see things the same way."

"Ah. Well, most beings don't. But I assume you're talking about something specific?"

"I'm talking about being Team Voltron in the first place." Keith ran a hand through his hair, pushing sweaty bangs out of his eyes. "None of us chose this. Hunk and Pidge actually admitted they didn't want to be here—but now they're suddenly acting like they do. I'm not sure Shiro ever even thought about whether he wanted to do this or not. I'm not sure _Lance_ ever thinks about anything at all."

Coran coughed. "Well. And what about you?"

"I…want to be here." He said it quietly, carefully. He tried to keep his words controlled, because the feeling wasn't. "A lot. I didn't have anywhere to be, and now…I get to do something that matters."

"It's a heady feeling," Coran said, and something in his voice made Keith look him over.

Shoulders as wide as they'd go, chin up a bit, hands behind his back. Coran didn't usually stand like that, and Keith was reminded of some of the talks he'd had with his teachers before he'd washed out of the Garrison.

But he wasn't going to bother lying about this. What was Coran going to do, launch him into space? Everybody here was pretty much stuck with him. "Yeah," he admitted.

"Are you afraid of it?"

 _Huh_. That wasn't something he'd considered. "I guess? Maybe. Sometimes."

"Why?"

He took a deep breath and thought it over, finally letting his bayard revert to its standard form. "I already yelled at Pidge once because of it," he admitted. "I thought that because I was right, I could say anything I wanted. Shiro had to push me back into line."

"Was this when Pidge was planning to leave the team?"

"Yeah."

"I see." Coran nodded. "Well, you're right that defeating the Galra empire is a worthy cause, and that you're an indispensable part of it. You clearly have a lot of enthusiasm for the job…but how well you succeed will depend on where you _channel_ that enthusiasm."

"Where I channel it?"

"Yes. For example, you've been making great strides in your hand-to-hand combat, and in your exercises with your lion. I've been keeping an eye on your progress, and it's quite impressive!"

"Thanks…?" This definitely felt like a talk with an instructor. For some reason, though, it was less annoying than he remembered those being.

"But even with all that progress, you don't seem satisfied."

Keith frowned. "Of course not. There's always room for improvement."

"Well, I'm not going to argue with that attitude!" Coran smiled at him. "But the next time you get stuck on a training exercise, maybe you could try using some of that determination to go talk to your teammates. Try getting to know them a little better. Let them get to know you."

He took a deep breath before he could reject the idea right away. What Coran was saying did sound a little reasonable. Still, he gave Coran a skeptical look. "You really think that'd be a good idea?"

"Of course! It may not go smoothly at first, but it's sure to pay off in the long run." Coran shrugged and turned, walking towards a rack of training weapons. "In the meantime, I think I can see what's tripping you up," he called over his shoulder. "It's a question of footwork—may I?" He plucked a sword from the wall and brandished it, with what looked to Keith like slightly rusty but otherwise considerable skill.

"Sure." Why not? This was a kind of interaction he knew how to deal with.


	13. Outdoor (Coran & Hunk)

"Coran, what do you think of this?"

Coran sniffed at the brightly colored bulb Hunk was holding between gloved fingers. "Seems fine to me."

Hunk double-checked with the scanner he'd set up on his forearm screen, but he was already pretty sure what the result would be. The colors were too bright for anything else. "…No, that's poisonous. Well, probably poisonous. I'm not gonna risk it."

"I don't understand how you humans can be so fragile! Between your poor blood filtration and and your overzealous immune systems, it's a wonder you survived long enough to achieve even rudimentary space travel!"

"You're telling me." Hunk sighed and tossed the plant off to one side. "It might be why our sense of taste is different from your guys', though."

"Indeed," Coran sniffed. "I knew something was wrong from the start, of course—not appreciating _my_ cooking!—but, of course, it was due to discrepancies in the number and type of your taste receptors."

"Of course." Hunk grinned a little, embarrassed. "Sorry about that, by the way. I kinda took over your kitchen."

"Think nothing of it! Your human food is a little bit…different…but not at all unpleasant. Surprisingly refreshing, actually, from time to time." Coran picked some sort of grayish-brown herb and handed it to Hunk for analysis. "In fact, I feel that I'm almost starting to understand the nuances of human physiology, just from sampling your preferred foodstuffs."

"Yeah?" Hunk said, pleased. "I can see that. Different foods are an important part of different human cultures. Oh, hey, and this one's good! Into the bag with you."

"I'm not sure I'd appreciate _those_ nuances," Coran admitted, as Hunk put away the sample Coran had given him and headed toward what looked like some kind of upside-down mushroom. "I'm only beginning to understand the biological aspects. Humans are delicate, but fascinating. Your species is probably much younger than Altea was in its heyday, but you've come a great distance in a relatively short span of time. And that's just you as a species, not to mention you personally! It's a rather unorthodox choice the lions made, but I must say I approve."

"Thanks." Hunk grinned. "But seriously, it's kind of amazing no one's broken out in hives by now. Or gotten a deadly space disease."

"Oh, self-replicating anti-pathogens are a matter of course in all of advanced civilization. Even the Galra should still be using that particular Altean technology. It's one of our finest achievements!"

Hunk froze, taking a second to process that. "Dude. You have microscopic, airborne, _self-replicating_ AI?"

"Of course." Coran shrugged. "Doesn't everyone?"

"AI that _kills germs_."

"And neutralizes viruses. How else do you go about preventing galaxy-wide epidemics?" Coran shrugged.

There was only one thing to say to that, Hunk decided. "… _Please_ don't tell Pidge about this."

"Oh, don't worry," Coran assured him. "I believe young Pidge is already busy tinkering with the translation algorithms that were installed in your brains when when you first came to the castle."

"… _What."_


	14. Dilation (Keith & Hunk)

**A/N:** **Warning: this chapter gets pretty dark. See the end-of-chapter notes for specific content warnings.**

 **Also, thanks to the reviewers who let me know this chapter had glitched out. It should be fixed now.**

* * *

It had been a while since he'd slept around other people. In the castle, everyone had their own quarters. At the Garrison, no one did. And…before that, Keith had sometimes been forced to share his private spaces, if they could even be called that. When you lived in a stranger's house, nowhere really felt private.

That was probably what had brought it on—the bad memories, the association of hearing other people's sleeping breaths. That and the training robot that had chased him through half the ship a few days before. But Lance had insisted on a sleepover to help get over his last few jitters about the ship, and Pidge and Hunk had agreed, calling it a party to celebrate finishing their repairs to the castle-ship. They were his teammates, and he was supposed to be getting to know them better. So he hadn't said no.

In hindsight, perhaps that hadn't been the best call.

Coran and Allura had bowed out before lights-out, but the rest of them had settled in, each with their own pile of pillows and blankets. Shiro had told Pidge off for using their forearm screen under the covers, waited for everyone else to seem asleep, and then wandered off somewhere on his own. Keith had been tempted to join him, but he'd drifted off before he could make up his mind on the matter.

Now, he was in the dark and not alone. Something was coming for him.

He heard it breathing first—heaving, ragged, uneven breaths. Its footsteps were almost silent as it got closer, and then it was stepping on him. A knee, and then his stomach, and then his chest, settling one hand on his throat. He couldn't quite feel the specific sensations, but he knew it was there because he couldn't breathe.

He opened his eyes and stared it in the face. He couldn't look away. He had no words to describe what he was seeing, and a part of him just…went away for a little while. He was so frightened and so, so _angry,_ but he couldn't do a thing.

He searched for something, anything, that could save him, and three words rang in his head. _Patience yields focus_.

He struggled with his eyes until they drifted to halfway open and partly out of focus, trying to ignore the slavering _thing_ inches from his face. Then, still staring down the beast (it looked a bit like one of the Galra now, but that was better, that was manageable), he began slowly reaching out to his fingers, toes—anything he might be able to get to respond. There was nothing; he felt like he was encased in lead.

 _Patience_. Maybe something closer to home? If _home_ was his brain, then…

Eyes, no. Nose and ears, how even? His mouth wouldn't move, but maybe…

He tried his tongue, and it shifted faintly. Something about the sensation reoriented him, and he kept focusing on moving it, until suddenly…

His arms and legs hadn't been where he thought they were, and now he'd found them again.

He lunged upright, one hand splayed against his chest and the other fighting to support him as he swayed. The thing was gone, had in fact probably never been there. The others were all nearby, sleeping. They weren't supposed to be here. What had happened to his room?

Shiro. Shiro wasn't here. The rest of the team was here, but Shiro wasn't. Keith struggled through another breath and tried to think. He wasn't sure whether he himself was somewhere he wasn't supposed to be, or if the ship had started playing tricks again, or if his had been scrambled like Shiro's had been—but wait, no, Shiro had said that was Sendak playing tricks…

"Hey."

It took him a second to recognize that someone was talking to him, and longer still to turn his head.

"Your pupils are _huge_ ," Hunk said sleepily. "You all right?"

…He'd thought all of him was back in one piece, but words weren't quite there yet. He swallowed, clenching his fists.

 _Answer when spoken to_. It was one of the rules that he'd had eventually gotten through his brain for being a gracious guest. Follow the unspoken rules, and things went smoothly. Don't, and…

"Hey, it's okay. Did you have a nightmare?" Hunk pulled himself within comfortable whispering range, starting to sound more alert. "We fixed the ship. Nothing's malfunctioning anymore. Everyone's safe."

Keith nodded. "I…couldn't move," he managed, struggling through deep breaths.

"Ooh. Sleep paralysis?" Hunk whistled silently. "That's harsh. It's all right, it isn't real. Has it happened to you before?"

Keith wasn't sure, but he didn't remember anything exactly like this. He shook his head.

"Man, that's the worst. Lance told me about that—you gotta keep your eyes closed, if you can. And move your tongue, or something. It just means your sleep's a bit out of whack, but your brain can go nuts making stuff up to figure out what's going on."

Keith wasn't particularly interested in explanations, and he was a little annoyed that of all people, he'd managed to preemptively take Lance's advice. But he did notice that as Hunk spoke, he edged closer, until he was in range to throw an arm over Keith's shoulder.

It should have felt like he was being crowded, like all the other displays of closeness he'd been subjected to over the years. But it didn't. Hunk's arm and side were solid, undeniably present, and his breathing was slow and even. If something were going wrong, Keith reasoned, Hunk would know, and he wouldn't be this calm. He would be moving, doing something important, or at least on-edge and jumpy. He wasn't. That meant that Hunk was right. Everything was okay. He was safe.

It was hard to relax when he was surrounded by other people, with obligations he knew he shouldn't break forcing him to stay. But it helped, knowing that those people were his team. If danger presented itself, they'd have each other's backs. And if one of them had a nightmare…

…They'd be comforted. Huh. It was easy enough to envision when it was one of the others, but Keith hadn't quite realized that same logic could apply to himself.

He leaned his head against Hunk's shoulder, and Hunk shifted to rest his chin atop it, mumbling something about his hair.

"Thanks," he murmured, still a bit stunned, lost in thought.

Hunk's voice was soft, when he answered, but unmistakably warm. "Anytime, man. Anytime."

* * *

 **A/N: Warnings for: sleep paralysis, (fairly mild?) horror, suffocation. Also hints at Keith having had a bad time in foster care. I think that covers everything?**

 **...Anyway. My own experiences with sleep paralysis have all been relatively mild, but I've heard that for some people it can be downright horrifying. I've heard on the Internets that tongue-wiggling can indeed help you wake up a bit quicker, and that it's best to keep your eyes shut if you think of it—giving your brain less leeway make things up helps.**

 **I have some experience with waking up disoriented, too. I'm pretty sure that as coping measures for that go, having someone you trust to cuddle with is up there.**

 **Thanks for reading!**


	15. Reinforce (Pidge & Allura)

"Hey, uh, Princess? Can I come in?"

Coran had been right—the time she'd spent in the AI chamber with Father had worn her out. It was difficult to Allura to rouse herself enough to look at the youngest paladin, but she found it in herself to do so. "Of course, Pidge. What is it?"

"I, uh, wanted to see how you were doing." They shrugged. "Coran said something about you sneaking out of bed and tiring yourself out, so I…thought I'd check in on you, I guess. If that's okay."

"Of course," Allura said. "Come in, have a seat. I'm afraid I can't offer you tea or something similar—Coran has me on strict bed rest for the rest of day."

"That's okay." They shrugged. "If I wanted something to eat, I'd ask Hunk."

Allura smiled. "Thank you for being so understanding."

Pidge smiled, more gently this time. "I'm really glad you're okay. The rest of us are, too. But I'm sorry you're stuck in bed. That sucks."

"It's…not something I'm used to," she agreed.

"I know that feeling. When I got sick as a kid, I'd basically climb the walls. I gave my parents a heck of the time."

Allura couldn't help it; she giggled. "That sounds like something we have in common."

The linguistic nuances were difficult to pin down, she reflected, and the simplicity of human verbs was not helping. But perhaps it made sense, that a species without the ability to shapeshift would rely so heavily on "to be," without the degrees of subtlety that she was used to. All she could tell was that when Pidge said "I'm a girl," it meant something different from the way Allura would mean it if she said it—but she wasn't sure quite what the difference was, or if it was something Pidge would ever want to talk about. Either way, with what she'd come to understand about them so far, she doubted the two of them would be able to bond based on the superficial similarities they shared when compared to the ship's other inhabitants. It left her at a bit of a loss for how to treat Pidge, so she'd tried to treat them as simply another paladin, perhaps younger than the others but no less fierce for that.

She was glad that they could share some things, even if they were memories that had turned bittersweet. In a way, Pidge had even less than she did; she could call up the memory of her father on a whim for a conversation, but all Pidge had were memories and fears for their father and brother. No wonder they seemed determined to stop at nothing to get them back.

Pidge squirmed, drawing her attention back to them. She hadn't seen this exact expression before—suddenly, Pidge looked very unsure of themself. They were holding something behind their back, too, she realized. Allura craned her neck a little, trying to see what it was.

"I brought you something," they admitted, and took their hands from out behind their back. One was holding what looked like a rudimentary projection cube, and the other something even stranger—a cobbled-together mass of wire and molded plastic, covered in analogue buttons and a strange thing like a projection from the top of a wheel.

"It's a game," Pidge explained. "Well, a platformer, to be specific. Mostly." They scratched sheepishly at the back of their neck. "Altean tech can do some stuff really easily that human tech couldn't, so I made some modifications."

Experimentally, Allura booted up the cube, and saw a little blocky princess appear, with ledges here and there. She poked at the controls to figure out what they did, and the princess almost immediately fell down into what appeared to be an ocean of lava. A sad little tune played, but after a moment the princess reappeared.

Pidge winced, grinning. "Ouch. Here, I can show you how—"

"No need." Having gone through each of the buttons, more or less confident in what they all did, Allura began working her way up the obstacle course Pidge had created. It scrolled upward as she continued, ending in a small green flag. She reached the flag and a tinny fanfare played, before the game transported her to the next level.

Pidge blinked. "Good job," they managed, clearly taken aback. "You managed that…really fast." Then they grinned. "That's okay, though. I made a _lot_ of levels."

"This is so thoughtful," Allura said, putting the controller aside for a moment to take Pidge's hand. "Thank you,"

Pidge blushed. "My brother used to bring me games and puzzles when I was sick," they mumbled. "It was the only thing that would keep me in bed long enough to get better."

"It's a wonderful idea," Allura said, squeezing their hand gently.

"Yeah, well…you'll have to tell me if the gameplay is balanced," Pidge said frankly. "I tried to make the level progression hard enough, but I've never programmed for an Altean before."

"It's wonderful," Allura said happily. "I already love it."

"Yeah, well, you're welcome," Pidge said. They looked pleased with themself, she thought. "Try to get some sleep, okay? I did put in a pause button."

Allura smiled. "I'll keep that in mind."

If she spent the next day and a half awake and determined to beat the last level, at least it was time she spent in bed instead of wandering the castle. And if Pidge had tried to make the last few levels technically impossible…well, they certainly weren't going to admit it.


	16. Wastefully (Lance Keith)

Every now and then, Lance and Keith would try to get to know each other better, but neither of them realized this. Shiro did, but that was only because it was his job to keep an eye on his team's dynamics.

Pidge was busy with the literal universe of tech that had opened up to them, and also with their missing family members. Hunk, ever aware of rough edges, would sometimes distract Lance when it seemed likely he and Keith would clash, and he only acted friendly with Keith when Lance was otherwise occupied.

(It had occurred to Shiro that Lance could get jealous of sharing Hunk with Keith. It seemed to have occurred to Hunk, too, or else his loyalties were always carefully defined and demarcated. Either way, it was a good thing that Hunk was sensitive, because Keith and Lance both had trouble from time to time in that area. Shiro would hate to have to straighten out a problem like that.)

As for the princess and Coran, they didn't pry in the relationships of teenage aliens, which was probably for the best, all things considered. Shiro was occasionally tempted to introduce Allura to the concept of the "getting along shirt," but so far he'd refrained.

Part of the reason for that was that there were efforts of a sort happening on both sides. Oddly enough, Keith was more attached to bonding with Lance than the other way around. The reason, of course, was that he saw it as a challenge. To Keith, challenges existed to be tackled as soon as it could be practically managed. It was part of the reason he'd grown to be so talented as a pilot and a fighter, but in this case enthusiasm could only carry him so far. It came across as a pretense because, deep down, he doesn't like Lance very much. Not yet, anyway, and not when he was thinking about it. It wasn't exactly personal, though Lance could get a bit irritating from time to time. Keith just didn't like very many people in a way they would recognize, and Lance probably wouldn't know how to handle it if he did.

So, yes, Keith would sometimes try to get to know Lance better. Unfortunately, he usually did it by either capitalizing on an unconscious impulse toward friendship—after the fact—or trying conversational topic that he could've picked up from a mediocre business manual. Needless to say, it failed to come off as genuine. Lance, who was very intuitive even if he didn't always realize it, definitely knew this, and most if not all of Keith's overt attempts at bonding had ended immediately in failure.

Lance, for his part, would sometimes be downright friendly to Keith, but it tended to happen when he wasn't thinking about it. That much, they had in common. Lance's response to it, though, was different: he would retroactively dismiss most moments of connection as soon as he'd realized they'd happened. For Keith, who usually took what people told him at face value, this effectively canceled out any accidental friendliness Lance displayed.

Keith knew, Shiro thought—he must know—that at least some of Lance's rivalry with him wasn't genuine. But Lance made it obvious that a rivalry was what he wanted. If it were any other of the paladins, they would (and, honestly, did from time to time) simply ignore Lance's posturing in favor of his innately kind and generous nature. Because it was Keith, he didn't.

The most frustrating thing was that he wasn't even holding a grudge: Keith struggled to present himself to others, so he took what Lance _wanted_ to be seen as at face value. After all, it was what he wished other people would do for him. If Lance wanted to be a jerk, as far as Keith was concerned, he would acknowledge that, and deal with it…usually by being a bit of a jerk right back.

Only during the times when neither of them was thinking were they able to meet halfway. Shiro sometimes found himself wishing he could do something to capitalize on those moments, but they were fragile—if they were noticed, they usually ended right away.

So, crises aside, he decided to leave them be. It was going to be harder for the two of them to form a rapport than it was between the others, but they were both capable paladins and kind young men. Given time, thoughtfulness, and a bit of luck, he was confident they'd be able to get over themselves and become friends.


	17. Burrow (Lance & Shiro)

Every now and then, life on the castle became a lot for Lance to handle.

It was one thing to know that he'd be away from his family for months at a time, even a year or more. He'd accepted that when he'd decided to become a pilot. It wouldn't be all that different from living at the Garrison, he'd reasoned. By the time he was qualified to fly his own ship, he'd have adjusted to the separation involved, be ready to send time-delayed messages instead of the letters and photos and videos he'd sent then to his family and friends back home.

But that was very, very different from this. He had no way of sending a message home. He was pretty sure that Earth was safe, but he wasn't 100% positive. And he wasn't sure _he'd_ be safe long enough to make it back. Worse, if he wasn't, then the Galra might win, and then the planet really would be in trouble.

Being out here, doing what he was doing, was the best way to protect himself, protect the Earth, and increase the chance he'd be able to see his family again. Knowing that really did help…but it didn't fix everything.

Lance didn't get why the other paladins didn't feel the same way he did. Okay, Pidge he could understand—if he had family somewhere out here and they needed help, he'd probably be a lot more motivated to stay out in space, too. He got the feeling he didn't want to know Keith's feelings on the matter—like everything else about Keith, they'd probably just be dumb and annoying.

Shiro…that was hard. Shiro had already been away for a year before returning, only to leave again with the rest of them. While on Earth, he hadn't exactly gotten the warmest welcome. Lance wondered sometimes if Shiro thought he wouldn't be welcome on Earth anymore, if he returned. He couldn't think of anything more lonely. It made him wonder if all of them were presumed dead—or maybe worse, criminals on the run. Kidnappers? They'd kidnapped Shiro, after all, and then vanished. There was no way of knowing what their families might have been told.

He knew that Hunk wanted to go back—they talked about it sometimes, when one of them got lonely and crashed in the other's room, where they'd dig into topics that hit close to home in the wee hours of the night—but, in a way he couldn't quite get, Hunk was able to push those feelings aside. Or rather, they were probably there all the time, but they didn't seem to jump out for Hunk when he was least expecting them. That still happened to Lance sometimes.

Lance was trying to learn to roll with those particular punches, but it was _hard_. Hard enough that the only way he could think to deal with it sometimes was to hoard every vaguely snuggle-able surface he could pilfer on the ship and curl up on his bed underneath them, and just sulk for a little while. Like he was doing now.

He was interrupted by a knock on the door, followed by Shiro's voice. "Lance?"

 _Oh no_ , Lance thought, scrubbing at his face and trying to scramble his way up and out of his makeshift nest. They were taking a break from training, and he'd thought that no one would miss him, but—

"Lance, are you in there?"

Of course he'd had his lights off—what better way to sulk? But if Shiro thought it meant the room was empty, and came in to check… "Coming!" he managed. Then his leg got tangled in one of the blankets and one of his arms slipped. There was an audible _thud_ as he fell out of his bunk and flat on his face.

"Ow…"

"Are you okay? I'm coming in…uh."

Lance wasn't sure what Shiro had expected to see, but apparently Lance face-planted on the floor with his rear end in the air, making a sheepish thumbs-up, wasn't it. "'M fine," he said. "But your timing could've been a little better."

"So I see," Shiro said. "…Everything all right in here?"

"Yep," Lance said, "great." He didn't get up and his voice was reedier than he would've liked, so he doubted Shiro would buy it.

Judging by the hand on his shoulder, he didn't. "Hey."

Lance looked up and met Shiro's gaze. He didn't look upset, just understanding. Lance let Shiro give him a hand up and perched on the edge of his blanket mountain. Shiro sat near the foot of the bed, one foot resting on his knee. He seemed ready to be patient.

"That's quite the pile you have there," he said, gesturing at the blankets.

"Uh…yeah." Lance scratched at his head, awkward. "Blanket hoarder, that's me. You know how it is."

"Not really," Shiro admitted. "It does seem comfortable, though."

"It is." Lance smiled a little. Part of the reason he did this was that it usually did help him feel better.

"…Anything you want to talk about?"

He shrugged. "There isn't really much to say. I just…still miss home sometimes, that's all, you know? I miss Earth."

Shiro looked pained. "I get that, buddy. I wish I could say we'll visit home soon, but…"

"But we probably won't get to," Lance said. "I know." He wasn't going to let himself start crying again. What Shiro was saying wasn't anything new, even though it still hurt to hear it.

"Yeah," Shiro said. "I'm sorry. I know it's hard for you—"

"It's hard for everyone," Lance said. "You, too." He leaned back against the blankets, arms behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. "It's even worse for Allura and Coran. They _can't_ go home."

"You're not wrong." Shiro looked a bit surprised, Lance thought. "But that's a lot to be thinking about when you're homesick yourself."

"Doesn't change the facts." Lance shrugged again. "The thing is, I get it. I know why we're out here, and it doesn't bother me anymore. Most of the time. But sometimes it still gets to me, you know? So…"

"This." Shiro gestured at the mess behind him.

Lance grinned wobbily, trying for humor. "Hey, it works. Even if it's not big on dignity."

"I can't argue with that. If it works for you, that's great. I won't judge." Shiro's smile faded, and he leaned forward. "But if you need to talk to me, I'm here. Okay? Maybe it's something all of us should talk about every now and then."

Lanced cringed a bit at the thought. "I wouldn't want to bring everybody down, though."

Shiro paused, considering that. "I think it might be a good idea, in the long run," he said eventually. "If we can all understand what the rest of us care about on Earth, I think it would only make us stronger."

"Maybe." Lance shrunk a little. "But for now, uh…don't tell the others?"

"Like I said, Lance, no judgment. I'm pretty sure we all have some weird habits." Shiro smiled, lopsided. "But don't worry. Your secret is safe with me."


	18. Satirizing (Coran & Pidge)

"Coran? Hey, are you in here?" Pidge called, looking around the workshop near the base of the castle.

A voice echoed from a distant corner. "What is it, Pidge?"

They craned their neck, trying to trace the sound to Coran's location. "Where _are_ you?"

"Over here!" A few moments, and then a hand appeared near the top of a heap of scrap metal that looked like it had all fit together at some point. The hand waved once and then retreated, accompanied by a worrisome crashing sound.

By the time Pidge had found a way to where Coran was, though, nothing looked more out of the way than usual. Coran was halfway underneath whatever the thing he was working on was—an old model of the food-goo machine, perhaps—searching through an elaborate toolkit.

Pidge folded into a ball next to him, arms around their knees. "Whatcha workin' on?"

"Oh, this and that," Coran said airily, selecting a comically small probe from the top shelf of the toolkit and bringing it to bear on a couple of wires. "I've half forgotten what some of this junk was even for, but you never know what might come in handy!"

"Right." Pidge scratched at one knee, awkward. "Look, sorry about earlier—the…thing about mustaches. We weren't trying to make fun of you or anything, but…yeah."

Coran sniffed and waved a hand. "Oh, I expect a little rambunctious fun out of you younglings. Nothing to worry about on my account."

"Are you sure?" Pidge frowned. "Hunk was worried we might've hurt your feelings."

"Not at all! Never fear, my pride in my pogonotrophics is unsinkable."

"Oh, okay. That's cool." They paused, uncurling a bit. "I really like your mustache. I think it's neat."

"Oh. Well! Thank you very much."

"I'd totally grow one, if I could."

That made Coran pause, and set his tool aside. "Pidge…"

"Yeah?"

"I forget sometimes that you humans can't change your physical forms the way Alteans can," Coran admitted, looking down at his hands. "I thought I'd just ask, to be sure—do you want me to stop the height-ranking thing? Because it's convenient, I don't want to rank you based on limb order, but—"

"Coran, it's okay," Pidge chuckled. "I don't mind."

"Are _you_ sure? Because—"

"Sure, I'm the smallest," Pidge said, shrugging. "I'm also the youngest. And I'm sneaky. It balances out. Besides…" Their grin turned a little more evil. "I will _never_ get tired of Keith's face when you call him Number Four."


	19. Carve (Hunk & Pidge)

Having Hunk as a team member was an adjustment to Pidge's lifestyle up to that point.

Pidge had an older brother, sure. He'd been annoying from time to time, of course. But Matt was also Dad's assistant, and a young prodigy training for an illustrious mission. By the time Pidge had begun to get really sensitive to being bugged, Matt had already had better things to do.

Hunk, though, poked and prodded. He asked questions, and when Pidge wasn't around, gathered the answers himself. He _messed_ with their _tech_ and then came up with sudden innovations about how to apply it that sent Pidge's head spinning with new possibilities. Half of which he then did everything he could to prevent Pidge from trying, because clearly he was a giant hypocrite as well as a spoilsport. After all, Pidge's experiments to date had hardly been catastrophic. Annoying, sure, but overall much more helpful than they were actually dangerous.

(Pidge did, in fact, break the translation algorithms within about a week of finding out about them, but they got them working again, too. It just took a little while. It did provide a valuable team-building exercise, though, and Pidge had finally been able to start learning spoken Altean, so overall they counted it as a win.)

And that was another thing. Hunk could list every single risk about any given scenario, and hated to get into even the tiniest sticky situation. It was beyond annoying to listen to him whine about every little thing that might possibly go wrong…especially since Pidge knew, without a doubt, that as soon as he was truly backed into a corner, Hunk would go above and beyond to get not just himself, but the whole team safely through whatever hardships they ran up against.

Shiro had been trained by evil aliens, and Allura _was_ an alien. Hunk was just Hunk, and in terms of sheer strength he far outstripped the rest of them. But he'd rather fight with brains than with brawn, which was a good call on his part, because Pidge knew that he was scary smart. He kept it under wraps, though. Every now and then he'd just pour out with something that sounded like it came straight out of an academic paper—then stop, shuffle his feet, and look away, like he'd been caught singing by strangers.

Pidge _hated_ that. It was easier for them to write an algorithm than explain it, but Hunk made it look easy. And they suspected his grasp of the sciences was broad enough to rival anyone on the team, even Shiro, only he hardly ever opened up and admitted it.

For all that he spent a lot of time acting nervous, he could lie like a darned rug. He'd used "dude" and "man" and "he" to Pidge constantly until their reveal, after which he'd stopped, sudden as a shut-off faucet. ("Guys," he'd established in a too-casual exchange at 3 AM during a joint tinkering session, was still acceptable. He used that sometimes, now.) That was the thing that made Pidge realize that, duh, he'd known their secret all along. He'd pretended he hadn't and solidified their cover story, right when it had started to look like the five of them were about to be spending a lot of time together. He'd done everything he could to make things easier for Pidge, so quietly that Pidge almost hadn't noticed, and didn't even realize until after the fact.

Pidge was used to fighting their way to the top to get what they wanted. In the year after their father's disappearance, it had become a way of life—the smallest, scrappiest cadet in the bunch, struggling to keep up with falsified records under the eyes of suspicious instructors. Hunk had a surprisingly thick skin, but that didn't mean Pidge liked catching him with their barbs all the time.

So, yes, having Hunk around was an adjustment. But Pidge liked to think they were adjusting.


	20. Depose (Keith & Coran)

"Do Alteans need sleep?"

"Gah!" Coran jolted upright from where he'd been slouched in front of a translucent monitor. He craned his neck around to glare at Keith, who was leaning casually against the wall behind him. "When did you get in here?"

"You blinked," Keith deadpanned.

Coran eyed him, as though trying to decide whether he believed that. Keith intentionally ignored it, instead pushing off the wall and bending toward the screen Coran had been staring at.

"What are you doing here at this hour of the night?" Coran demanded.

"Asking you a question. I think you just answered it." Keith looked him over. "This castle is seriously big. How large of a crew was it meant to support?"

"Usually several hundred, though the exact number could vary quite a bit under different circumstances." Coran's eyes lit up with a memory. "Once, during the war, we managed to evacuate an entire lunar colony. The population was upwards of a thousand, for three weeks! Every day was like a slumber party—well, with a few blood feuds and other petty rivalries to spice things up a bit. Ah, that was a good time."

Keith blinked at that, trying to imagine it. He kind of wanted to crawl out of his skin at the thought, but Coran seemed genuinely enthusiastic. "…Okay, then, a thousand is stretching it. What about a minimum? What if there was a personnel shortage or something—how many crew would be on rotation at a time?"

"In theory, a skeleton crew of about thirty or so could man the full complement of systems for a full Altean day cycle," Coran rattled off, then paused. "But admittedly, back in the day, it hardly ever came to that."

"And that was the people piloting it," Keith said. "Not the mechanics and support staff."

"No. Well, those jobs tended to come up more at random." Coran shrugged. "Even after he retired, my father used to go out with the repair crews on the busy days. Sometimes, they'd need every spare set of hands that knew how to twist a wire! Other times, there'd only be about half a dozen on any given shift."

"Right." Altean tech sure was something, for such advanced equipment to require so little oversight. But so was Coran, who didn't seem to have realized where Keith was going with these questions. That was either impressively stubborn of him, or yet another point in Keith's favor. "What'd _you_ do back then?" he pressed.

"Oh, this and that. Anything to keep things running smoothly for King Alfor." Coran finally turned a suspicious squint on Keith. "Why so many questions?"

"Just thinking out loud." Keith looked over the console again. "The rest of us can't read Altean yet, but we are working on it, you know."

"…Why are you telling me that?"

"And there hasn't been much to do lately, other than repairs. You were saying just earlier today that it'd take a while to get back to Galra-occupied space."

"…Okay…"

"Hunk's taken over the cooking, and he and Pidge is trying to fix the damage the Galra crystal did to the systems."

"…Yyyesss…"

"And Shiro's spending a lot of time with Allura to figure out our next move."

"Is it a human custom to say a bunch of unrelated statements in a row? Is there a cultural norm I'm missing here?"

He actually sounded a little mad. Huh. Keith considered himself lucky he'd approached things from this angle, if Coran's fuse was shorter than usual. "I can take a shift for you every once in a while. If you want."

"…What."

Coran looked a bit like Keith had sprouted another head. Keith bit back a snicker. "Look, you just admitted that you're trying to do the work of at least a dozen people. I know you're trained in fighting, and you're _still_ spacing out. I don't know how much sleep Alteans need, but I know it's some, and I'm guessing you could use more."

Coran frowned. "I can't possibly ask you to—"

"I've been studying Altean with Pidge," Keith cut him off. "I sure can't fix things—that's Hunk's job—but if you show me what diagnostics to cycle through, I can keep an eye on the ship's system for a few hours. I should be able to recognize alerts and warnings, and get you if something important's gone wrong." He put a hand on his hip, frowning at the system output. "I know you probably have AI that can send you alerts for this sort of thing, but for whatever reason you don't rely on it enough. And I need something to do. We're between missions right now. I have too much downtime."

Coran watched him while he laid out his argument, as though trying to figure him out. Keith wondered how much of him Coran could see. His frustration at being cooped up indoors for so long with so little to do? His mounting intimidation, as he spent his free time trying to grasp the scope of what they were up against? His hatred of being barely more useful than Lance, when everyone else on the team was doing something important?

His unreasonable worry that everyone here had found a comfortable role as the team settled in to prepare, and he was the odd one out?

He hoped it wasn't any of those. He wanted Coran to consider his proposal at face value. If he'd thought his abilities were utterly useless, he wouldn't have offered. This was the closest thing he could think of to his skill set—instinct and data gathering, odd connections and trying to feel out a large, complex mechanical system for a device much bigger than he was. Besides, with Allura and the ship both worn down so far, Coran needed backup.

Finally, Coran sighed, tugging at his forelock with one hand. "I won't be able to teach you everything at once," he said. "We'll have to start with the very basics and work from there, and even then it won't be easy."

That sounded like a yes. "You'll teach me?" Keith double-checked, anticipation rising.

"I'll teach you." Coran pressed a few transparent buttons, and the screen faded. He stretched his back, joints popping in a way that sounded slightly worrying. "Starting tomorrow."

Keith frowned. "But—"

"You're right—the AI can handle it here for a few of your Earth 'hours,'" Coran said, rubbing at his neck. "I know you're supposed to be in bed, paladin. Get back there, and don't show your face in here again till 0500 on the dot. Got it?"

Keith suppressed a groan—he hadn't been getting up that early lately—but stood at attention. "Got it. 0500. I'll be here."

"Good." Coran waved a hand. "Back to bed with you. Don't sneak up on anyone else tonight."

"I'll try not to." Turning to the door, Keith couldn't quite stop himself from adding one last reassurance, though he wasn't sure whether it was more for Coran or for himself. "You won't regret this."

Coran's snort echoed after him as he vanished back to his quarters.


	21. Stabilized (Allura & Pidge)

**A/N: Sorry for the delay—in exchange, this one's longer than usual. Oh, and general hurt/comfort warning. I'm mean to Pidge in this chapter.**

* * *

Team Voltron been focused on wrecking the Galra mining facility below, and had barely registered the station until after their work was finished. It had contacted them with great enthusiasm; apparently the station, though small, was host to a number of alien species that had been mistreated by the Galra. They were ecstatic to have the influence of the colony removed, and invited the team to a feast on the spot to show their gratitude.

"We can't expect a party _every_ time we succeed," Allura had warned the paladins, but she was pretty sure that no one but Shiro had been listening. Lance was ready to bask in the glory and adulation of the people they'd rescued, Hunk was eager to try the food on offer at the feast, and Pidge and Keith both looked quite pleased with themselves.

Which was how they'd found themselves here, the paladins in space suits in place of formal attire and Allura and Coran both in their best, guests of honor at a feast in a foreign spaceport.

A lot had changed in ten thousand years, and this wasn't an area that Allura was particularly familiar with. She wasn't sure which of those things was responsible, but she didn't recognize half the dishes that had been set before them. She was Altean to the core, though, and curious about all of them. She began taking samples of whatever she thought she could politely get at, wondering what nutrition might be available from them.

The humans and Coran all matched her enthusiasm, with a distinctly lower level of politeness. Shiro was trying, but he clearly didn't know exactly what some of the cutlery was even made for; he kept glancing at Allura out of the corner of his eye, as if searching for hints. Coran and Hunk immediately sampled a little of everything and began arguing back and forth, comparing human and Altean taste buds. Keith tried one thing from a nearby dish, and then, apparently deciding that he liked it, heaped his plate and dug in. Lance poked a little suspiciously at everything before settling on what were probably the most familiar-looking choices. Pidge, utterly unashamed, was sampling _everything_ within reach (including whatever they could reach by standing on their chair), rattling off the results to everyone in earshot and offering up random recommendations to their companions.

None of their hosts seemed upset by their behavior, Allura noted. Neither did the rest of the guests, who were mingling freely in the large hall and behaving just as chaotically as the paladins. Worries assuaged, she settled back to enjoy the feast, watching the rest of her team's antics.

"…And this one's…weird, it's all tingly." Pidge was making an odd face, lips puckering.

Lance, looking over from his nicely-balanced plate, frowned. "'Tingly' isn't a flavor, Pidge."

"Yeah, it is," they insisted. They stuck out their tongue, scraping it against their teeth. "Actually, it kinda hurts now…"

There had been something slightly strange about Lance's expression before, but Allura only recognized the worry now, as it grew more intense. "Hey, Shiro?" he called, pitched to carry over the sound of the feast.

Shiro, on Allura's other side, leaned forward to look down the table at him. "What is it?"

Lance had gone very pale. "We have a problem. A big one."

Shiro immediately stood and walked over to where Lance was sitting next to Pidge. While Allura had been looking away, Hunk had taken a spot on Pidge's other side. He had one hand on their shoulder, and the other poking at the dish they'd said tasted odd. He looked frantic. Shaking under his hand, Pidge was going splotchy pink, and couldn't seem to speak properly. One hand kept reaching up to uselessly massage their throat.

Allura felt her heart freeze in her chest. Pidge had been fine just a few moments ago. What was going on?

"I think it's an allergic reaction," Hunk said quickly. "I don't know what it's to, I don't know what's _in_ this food…"

"It's okay. We'll figure it out." Shiro took Pidge's other shoulder, leaning down to look them in the eye. "Pidge, listen to me. We need to get you back to the ship. Is it all right if I carry you?"

Tears were standing in Pidge's eyes. They nodded.

"Okay." Shiro scooped Pidge up and cradled them against his torso. "Coran, you're with me. We might need to use a healing pod, though I'm hoping it won't come to that. Hunk, bring whatever it was that Pidge was eating. We need to figure out what triggered the reaction."

Hunk scooped up the plate and nodded, and the three of them were off, through a side door and back to the black lion.

Below them, the party was grinding to a halt. More and more people had stopped what they were doing in favor of staring at them; an ominous silence filled the large room, disturbed only by whispers.

Allura raised her head, trying to look every inch the princess. She didn't want their diplomatic relations with these people to falter if they didn't have to. If she could get their hosts to help her figure out what had happened, all for the better.

She swept over to the leaders in charge of the banquet. One, a grayish-brown color with bumpy protuberances for eyebrows, met her worried gaze. "Could we please speak to the cooks in attendance?"

He waved a hand, and a team of aliens in mishmash uniforms—makeshift guards, she guessed—hurried through a door to one side of the hall. Seconds later, the first of perhaps a dozen different aliens came out of the door, most in stained aprons and with increasingly panicked expressions.

Allura, watching, frowned. It wasn't these people's fault that this had happened. She hoped the guards weren't being too rough with them…

She froze. Under cover of a knot of tentacled beings all arguing loudly with one another, she thought she saw…

"Wait!" she called, voice cracking like a whip throughout the hall. She pointed a finger, and every eye in the room followed it. "You, there. If I could speak to you for a moment?"

The figure was heavily cloaked, and had almost made it to a large knot of partygoers without her noticing their departure from the kitchens. As she pointed them out, however, four guards dove after them, foiling a surprisingly nimble attempt at escape. As the figure fell, the hood of the cloak fell back, revealing large, unmistakable purple ears.

"A Galra soldier," she whispered. She steeled herself against the chill that ran down her spine and strode forward. "It would appear there is a saboteur in our midst."

Their host, about to be left behind, swept into action. "Search him!" he screeched, rushing to catch up with Allura. "Princess, I had no idea that any Galra had made it here from the site of the battle. I offer you my deepest apologies—"

He was cut off by one of the guards yelling in pain. She fell, clutching at her knee, and the struggles by the Galra grew more intense as he tried to make use of the opening. He failed, and a moment later he was pinned again, pockets and armor being searched methodically by one of the guards.

"Here!" one of them shouted, revealing an empty vial. There was a hint of a dark liquid visible at the bottom."

The Galra soldier snapped at the guard's fingers, almost making them drop the vial. "Let me _go_! Death to the enemy! _Vrepit sa!_ "

"Was that all you could find?" Allura asked, and the guards all nodded, one pulling out cuffs as the rest of them forced the soldier's arms behind his back.

"I assure you," her host said, voice bubbling in anger, "we will be questioning him thoroughly. If there is more to this story than that vial can tell you, we'll find it."

She should get involved in this, Allura knew. She didn't much like the way the way this man said 'questioning.' But this station wasn't a reliable ally—that had just been made clear—and she couldn't see much benefit in getting tangled up in their affairs. Besides, she had somewhere more important to be. "Thank you very much, but for now this will suffice," she said crisply, tucking the vial into her robe. "I need to get back to my paladins." She let her voice soften a little. "We thank you for your hospitality, though this celebration didn't end in a way any of us would have wished. But we must be on our way."

Her host closed his eyes, defeated. "It is as you say, your highness. Please, take care."

The rest of the station's inhabitants parted before her as Allura swept out of the hall. Keith and Lance, both similarly pale and silent, hurried after her.

She rode back in Lance's lion, because Keith had split off and dashed to where his was docked as soon as they were out of sight of the hall. Lance kept his flirting to a minimum for once, face hard and drawn. His grip stayed tight on his bayard until he had to put it away to work the blue lion's controls.

To one side of the castle's healing chamber was a set of beds, for patients that needed old-fashioned rest more than (or along with) full-fledged cryostasis as a part of the healing process. Pidge was in one of these when Allura and Lance arrived, a thermal blanket pulled halfway up their midsection, surrounded on all sides by hovering team members.

Pidge held up a shaky thumb as they came in. "I'm okay," they rasped out. They looked deflated, sweaty and pale, but their breathing was unlabored. Allura let herself breathe easy, too, settling into a chair that Shiro vacated for her. She put a hand on the lump of their shin under the blanket and squeezed, briefly startled at the frailty of the bones under her grip. She sometimes forgot how _small_ the smallest Paladin was.

Pidge giggled. "Hey, that tickles."

Allura lessened the pressure somewhat and smiled. "You're truly all right?"

"Yeah." Pidge looked around at the others, smiling shyly up at the others. "Seriously, good call, guys. I've never been allergic to anything before."

"It wasn't an allergy," Allura said grimly. She pulled out the vial and handed it to Coran. "At least one Galra soldier made it to that station. He tried to poison us, for revenge."

No one said anything aloud to that, but she heard a couple of gasps, and every face in the room darkened. Coran started muttering about lax security standards, and the rest of the paladins looked various degrees of scandalized and worried. Pidge just flopped back to stare at the ceiling and muttered, "Figures."

"I mean," Hunk said eventually, "I _guess_ space poisons are a little less scary than space allergens. If you think about it."

Lance raised an eyebrow at him. "I think that might just be you, man."

Keith lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. "Makes sense to me. Think about it."

"I am _thinking_ about it," Lance began, irritated. "Poison is scary! We did really make sure Pidge is okay, right? There aren't any hidden side-effects waiting to spring up without warning?"

"Thanks, Lance," Pidge said with hooded eyes.

"Any time," said Lance, entirely seriously. He was busy catching Coran's eye. "So?"

Coran eyed the vial with a detached curiosity. "I'll run a scan of the poison to make sure we caught everything, but yes, I'm fairly sure. No harm being safe, though." He tucked the vial away and put a hand on Pidge's head. "In the meantime, rest and relaxation till you're back to a hundred percent. Unless it's an emergency, you're staying grounded, pilot."

Pidge sighed, but didn't otherwise complain. Allura hoped they were truly feeling all right; they seemed to be dozing off already. Hunk and Lance followed Coran out of the room as he went to investigate the poison further. Keith went to lean against the wall, frowning absently, and Shiro stayed lurking at the foot of Pidge's cot, arms folded. They and Allura watched quietly as Pidge slipped into sleep, breaths gradually growing deeper, face relaxing. With their defenses down, Pidge looked even younger than usual—too young to be doing this, Allura thought. Too young to be away from home.

From the look on Shiro's face, she suspected he was thinking the same thing. He sighed, unhappy. "Maybe we should quit having public celebrations."

"It's…something to consider," she agreed.


	22. Periscope (Keith & Shiro)

Within moments of arriving in Sendak's ship, Shiro's countenance changed.

Before, he'd been perplexed, lost—but not scared, not the way he was now. Keith could see him trembling as he stared down the hallway, like he was remembering a nightmare.

This wasn't the Shiro he was used to, the one he'd known over a year ago, before he'd gone missing. The man in front of him said _war_ like it was obvious, like it was an _understatement_. Even if he was only catching glimpses of what had happened to him, Keith couldn't even begin to guess what he was seeing. It was big, Keith knew. Shiro wouldn't be thrown off by anything less.

Then Pidge talked Shiro into rescuing the prisoners, and suddenly Shiro was telling Keith he was on his own. Shiro had been right, but somehow Pidge had changed his mind. There was something in that exchange that Keith had missed, but he didn't have time to wonder about it now.

Without Shiro, he didn't know what to do. He didn't know where to go. He wasn't any good at following the energy he was supposed to be sensing; Lance had mocked him, but he was clearly better at it than Keith was. They _all_ seemed to know what he was supposed to be doing except him.

As he ran through the hallways, he doubted. He knew it didn't help to second-guess himself, but he was doing everything he could. He was going as quickly and quietly as possible up and down the hallways, just out of sight of the patrols, but he wasn't making any progress.

In fact…was he back where he started?

Yes, he realized. Yes, he was.

"You've gotta be kidding me," he groaned.

Maybe it was because he wasn't meant to be a pilot. Maybe he'd just pushed himself into something he hadn't been suited for, just like he'd forced his way into the Garrison and then been unable to handle it. Maybe he was doomed, and someone else should be here to retrieve the red lion, someone it'd actually bother talking to…

…Only there was no one else. There were only the five of them, and if Allura or Coran had meant to pilot one of the lions, they could have chosen to pursue them instead of sending Keith. Which meant he'd made a promise, and he was the only one who could make good on it. It was up to him to deliver.

Keith closed his eyes. " _Patience…yields focus_."

Shiro believed in him. Even if Keith was right, even if he hadn't been meant to do this…he wasn't ready to give up just yet.

A path flashed into his mind, through the corridors to a loading deck. There was an imposing red face staring him down at the end of it.

Keith smirked, breaking into a run. "Gotcha."


	23. Tug (Lance & Hunk)

Hunk was big enough that it kind of went without saying. He'd dressed up as Fezzik once alongside Lance's Inigo for a Halloween party—which, by the way, was _awesome_ , and it was a shame they hadn't been able to convince Pidge to come along. He'd almost been pressed into the Garrison football team, before Lance's insistence and Hunk's nerves combined managed to get him safely out again. He had trouble with finding clothes that fit, and ordered most of his stuff online. Lance and Hunk were two of the only boys Lance knew who tailored their clothes by hand to fit better.

(It turned out that Keith did, too. His sense of style was still awful, but Lance had to admit—grudgingly—that he was pretty good at mending.)

But all things considered, as far as Lance could tell, Hunk was pretty okay with his size. People at the Garrison hadn't bothered poking fun at _that_ too often, though they'd poked at his nervous disposition often enough that Lance sometimes had to snap at them to back off. Then there was the part where Hunk was a _total nerd_ , which helped in some cases and only made matters worse in others…

He was getting off track. The point was, Hunk was big, and that was fine. It was awesome, actually. Hunk was one of the strongest guys Lance knew. He gave hands-down the best friend-hugs (not the same as mom-hugs, obviously, but still, they were _really_ good hugs). And as far as Lance was concerned, he just plain looked good that way. Lance couldn't imagine someone saying Hunk was unattractive because of his size, and, well, Hunk was pretty insecure for a lot of reasons, but Lance was pretty sure that wasn't all that close to the top of the list.

He didn't poke fun at it directly, because while it wasn't exactly a sore spot, it'd be pointlessly mean. But he had to admit, it usually turned out to be pretty funny when Hunk got stuck in something.

It was not funny right now.

"Okay. Okay. We got this. No big deal." Lance kept a firm grip on Hunk's upper arm, glancing around to assess the situation. They'd managed to clear most of the debris from the rockfall away from the yellow lion's entrance. Hunk had managed to get his hatch open, despite his lion's almost complete power drain. He'd been on his way out when there'd been another, smaller rockslide, and now he was trapped between his lion's lower jaw and a couple of gigantic boulders, which were in turn holding up a worrisome amount of nasty-looking debris.

Keith and Shiro hovered over Lance's shoulders, bayard and hand out respectively, waiting to attack any other rocks that threatened. Pidge was keeping Allura informed while desperately trying to figure out why the slide had caught them by surprise in the first place. Lance's job was to help Hunk get through an opening that was definitely too small for him.

If they could form Voltron, they could fix this immediately. Unfortunately, they could not form Voltron, because the yellow lion was stuck. And badly damaged. And their heaviest lifter, and ugh, this whole situation was _so bad_.

"Y-you know, I am not actually claustrophobic," Hunk said, trying to keep calm, "but that might change in the next few minutes. If I live."

"Shut up, dude, you're gonna be fine." Okay, maybe he shouldn't have snapped, but he was trying not to freak out and Hunk's dire predictions _were not helping_. "Do you have any wiggle room at all?"

Hunk, to his credit, did his very best to wiggle. "Not a lot, no." He paused. "I could probably manage to go backward? But this really doesn't feel stable, if I do that I'm just gonna get cut off. And, y'know, possibly suffocate. So no."

Lance winced, and his grip on Hunk's arm tightened. "Yeah, let's try to come up with a better plan."

"Actually, I might have one!" Pidge said, face clearing. "But we'll only have one shot at it, and the rest of us should probably get clear."

"This does _not_ sound like my kind of plan," Hunk began, but Pidge and the others were already clambering away towards their lions, parked a safe distance away. He looked at Lance. "Aren't you going to—"

"Nope, not a chance."

"But Pidge said—"

"I'll risk it." He turned on his helmet link. "What's the plan, Pidge?"

" _Use your jetpack!_ "

Hunk blinked. "Seriously? That isn't a _plan_ , it's just a really bad idea! I'll get roasted, my cockpit will get roasted—I don't even know if it's working!"

" _Try!_ " Pidge insisted.

" _Hunk, you may want to hurry._ " Shiro's voice was measured, but tense. " _I'm seeing more signs of movement from above. You'll get buried if you stay where you are now._ "

Hunk swallowed. "That does kinda limit my options," he admitted.

Lance nodded, making up his mind. "Right. We'll do it together."

"What?"

"Twice the thrust means twice the chance, right?" He wrapped both of his wrists around Hunk's forearms, twisting in and around to reach Hunk's other arm. Hunk did the same for him, fingers and thumb overlapping as they tightened. His grip was intense, but that was a good thing—the stronger, the better, in this case.

"Hold on tight!" Lance told him. He couldn't see Hunk's face at this angle, but he could feel a tremor in his fingers. He could also feel a worse tremor above them, rushing the two of them on. "Three, two, one… _now_!"

They both turned on their jet-packs, and then there were a frantic few seconds as Lance tried to optimize his angle—and then they were loose, shooting off sideways and almost hitting another unstable mountainside a few hundred feet away. Then they overcorrected, almost crashing _again_ , and then they finally managed to get more or less upright, settling a few feet from the blue lion and pulling each other safely inside.

The lion took off by itself, and Lance and Hunk sat on the cockpit floor beside the chair for a minute, clinging to each other, covered in dirt and dust and happy to be alive. Hunk was gasping, like he hadn't had enough room to breathe properly before. Lance got his skinny arms around Hunk's shoulders, out of the way of his breathing, and just stayed, matching him breath for breath. He thought he could feel Hunk crying against his shoulder, but that was normal. Hunk nervous-cried pretty often when he was coming down from something scary.

Lance blinked away a tear or two of his own as he reassured the rest of the team that they were both fine. Shiro, Pidge, and Keith started work on the slide, using their lions to do some carefully calculated damage to some rocks. Shiro estimated they'd have the lion out within a day or two, less if the castle-ship got in on the demolition. Then he and Coran started arguing the specifics of that, and of towing and repair, and Lance muted the comm for a little while. Getting Hunk's lion out was still important, of course, but right now Lance's job lay elsewhere.

He settled in, giving Hunk a reassuring squeeze. Hunk might've had a natural advantage where hugs were concerned, but this time Lance was determined to give as good as he got.


	24. Perchance (Allura & Coran)

It just so happened, now, that Coran and Allura might be the only remaining members of the Altean species. As such, they would have to be a lot of things to one another, just to process (if not fill) the gaping holes that threatened to overshadow their whole lives. Allura was still feeling out the effects of what had happened—still afraid of realizing the full ramifications of everything that had been taken from her—but at the very least she knew that much.

She did retain hopes of finding descendants of their contemporaries one day. It seemed to her that there was a decent chance that _some_ Alteans had survived, despite everything. But if they had managed to escape notice for ten millennia, she wasn't sure whether she'd recognize them even if they crossed paths. Zarkon had ruled the Galra empire for all that time, and there was no way of knowing how deep his understanding of Altean technology and culture had grown during his time as a the black paladin. To escape his notice, any remaining ties to the Altean heritage had likely been severed—that was another thing that she could never forgive him for. Each thing she thought of was added to a very, very long list, one she thought she might never reach the end of.

So either way, she and Coran were relics of a bygone age, if not species. Coran, for his part, was gracious about it, and excellent at what he did (which was just about everything). He had gallantly stepped into the role of kindly uncle for the entire team just about immediately upon waking up. Allura, meanwhile, had lived up until entering stasis in her father's shadow, aware of the possibility that she might one day take his place but somehow unable to truly believe it.

Back before everything had gone wrong, the two of them hadn't spoken often. Coran was Alfor's advisor, and Allura still remembered the time during her childhood when he was too important and grown-up for her to pay much attention to. Of course, given that they'd been in stasis for 10,000 years, percentage-wise the age gap between them was now practically nonexistent, but she felt the difference in experience keenly. Allura might have been giving the orders to Team Voltron, but without Coran she wasn't sure she'd even have a direction, much less a plan of action.

In her moments of weakness, she trusted him to support her. She had to, and moreover, Coran had done already gone above and beyond to earn that trust. He could be overprotective, but he had reasons to be, so while she found it irritating sometimes, but she had to forgive him that. How could she not? It just showed how much he still cared, despite what he'd already suffered.

It was one of her dearest goals to come into her own under his instruction, and prove to him that his mentorship had made her the best she could be. It was the very least she could do after all he'd done for her. She was determined to become someone who could support him as he supported her—someone Coran could trust as a leader, as she was sure he'd trusted her father. It might take engineering the defeat of an entire galactic empire to reach that—not to mention spearheading the rebuilding she hoped for in the process—but if that was what it took, so be it. She'd get there.


	25. Nobody (Shiro & Pidge)

Pidge was difficult to pin down. They were made of secrets and walls and prickles, and then sometimes, through all of that, enough trust and earnestness radiated out to power a sun. Shiro wondered if the others felt the same urge to protect them that he did. He wondered if, like him, they ever worried about what that might mean, or fretted over the thought of a bias there. Pidge wasn't a weak point in the team, any more than any of the others were—they all had their obvious weak points and their more subtle ones. He worried about all of them often. Sometimes he worried the most about Pidge.

Pidge was his infiltration expert as well as his shield arm—quite literally his left hand in the shadows. It was a difficult and a vulnerable job, for many reasons. Pidge had to rely on subterfuge and tricks and tech, and they were good at all those things. But such skills could prove to be a double-edged sword, both to themselves and to the rest of the team.

Shiro begrudged not one member of his team their secrets. At first, he'd hoped there wouldn't be any, but there was no way that could work. They couldn't afford to hide important things from one another, and yet they needed space, too. Sometimes they needed secrets that two, or three, or even four of them might share, and hide from the rest, because that was what kept things running. Sometimes there were the secrets all of them knew, but pretended not to. Some of them were better at balancing all of it than others, but they were all learning.

Still, perhaps more than the others—certainly sooner—Pidge and Shiro had begun finding and carrying each other's secrets, and he didn't know what to make of that.

One big secret, Pidge had let out on their own, and that had gone over fine. But he didn't use their other name again, and he didn't mention it to the others. He had no idea if any of them knew it, and he didn't plan to ask.

Then there was the way that Pidge kept brushing up against some of his darkest moments. They knew what he'd lost in his crew, more than anyone else could. And as the two of them searched for Pidge's father and brother, bits and pieces of what he knew of the Galra came out into the open. Pidge always listened closely, face all hard lines and determination, to whatever Shiro had to say. Sometimes they hugged him—tight, desperate hugs that said so much about how sorry they were, how much they cared about him. He was always a bit taken aback by that. Pidge even knew what he'd done to their brother, and had forgiven him for it when he still couldn't entirely forgive himself. He didn't think he'd earned quite that level of faith, and couldn't bring himself to rely on it. Perhaps that was why he had yet to tell the others that particular story.

Sometimes, now that they and Hunk had figured out how to translate it, Pidge would plumb any and all depths of the Galra's network that they could reach, endlessly searching for hints of how to find their family or weaknesses Team Voltron could exploit. They learned things that they didn't tell anyone but Shiro, and then only when he came to visit them during long hours of database trawling in the middle of the night.

On such nights, Pidge sat in front of their screens, motionless, and muttered out fragments of cruel truths that they'd sussed out from soulless reports of Galra conquest. Dangerous ones, sometimes, or potentially useful, or worrisome, or just sad. Shiro would sit quietly and gather the pieces they dropped. He didn't want to leave Pidge to face it all alone, so he stayed. Pidge didn't tell the others about those nights unless they discovered something worth sharing, and Shiro followed their lead.

Those nights usually ended with Pidge falling asleep right in front of the screen. Shiro kept a close eye, but they always seemed too exhausted for nightmares. He'd watch their peaceful breathing for a while, until he was sure they were well and truly out, and then carry them back to their dim room. He'd watch from the doorway as Pidge settled, then breathe out a soft "good night" and go to his room, ready to fight for sleep himself.


	26. Foretell (Allura & Keith)

Forty-two hours ago, Shiro, Hunk, and Pidge had left together in Pidge's lion on a reconnaissance mission to a Galra warship that had been headed into unknown space. They'd missed their check-in by over fifteen hours now.

On the castle-ship, the rest of them had tried every coded frequency Coran dared, and a few he hadn't wanted to risk, at Allura's insistence—and gotten no reply to any of them. Keith and Lance had argued for an all-guns-blazing attack to distract the crew and give them a chance to escape, but Coran had insisted that they couldn't risk it. There had been no transmission from the ship reporting the presence of paladins yet, either. It was possible that so far, the team had managed to keep their cover.

That was the kindest possibility. The others kept repeating themselves over and over in Keith's head, somehow getting worse every single time.

He looked around the helm of the castle, disguising the motion in a stretch, searching for a distraction. Coran had disappeared somewhere, saying something about boosting the castle-ship's range. That left Keith, Lance, and Allura at the helm, each in their own separate corner of the room, each still and silent.

Lance had dozed off, elbow resting against the raised dais, his hand precariously supporting his chin. Keith couldn't find it in himself to hold it against him; he'd dropped off a little earlier, too, and only realized it when he'd woken up again. Lance's face was drawn even in sleep, unusually serious and worried. Keith was serious most of the time, but he'd grown used to Lance's joking in all but the most dire of situations, defusing tension before a fight and helping to release it after. He almost missed it now.

If something had happened…if the others weren't all right…what was he going to do about Lance? Lance idolized Shiro, and he looked out for Pidge like one of his own. And Hunk, as far as Keith could tell, was his best friend. He'd be devastated if something happened to them, and Keith…didn't relate to other people well, at the best of times. He knew he could deal with his own emotions, through sheer determination if nothing else. But Lance _cared_ , loudly and insistently and all over the place, and Keith couldn't do that, he _couldn't._ If something did happen—or even if they just took too long and Lance broke down—Keith would be lucky if Lance didn't throw him out of the airlock for not reacting whatever way normal people were supposed to.

…Okay, Lance wouldn't actually throw him out of an airlock, no matter what. Keith was pretty sure of that, at least. But he'd want to, and that was worse. If something happened to the others, he'd lose Lance too, even though Lance was technically safe, right in front of him. He hated how even when there were bigger things to worry about—his friends in _actual, real danger_ right this second—he couldn't shake the fear of Lance giving up on him.

None of that was relevant. It was a stupid emotion to have, so he repressed it. Lance already knew he was a jerk; Keith would rely on that. It'd be fine.

In his sleep, Lance's brow furrowed. Keith's jaw clenched as he looked away.

Allura's face was hidden in her arms, but he knew she wasn't asleep because her fingers were clenched tightly into fists. She seemed to be struggling to stay calm. Keith knew he was.

Suddenly, obeying an impulse, he got up. He tried to make enough noise so Allura knew he was coming, but not enough to wake Lance. A quick glance over his shoulder told him he'd succeeded. When he turned back, Allura was staring at him. Her eyes were rimmed with the tiniest bit of red, and Keith wondered if she'd been crying.

Still, Allura was nothing if not professional. She felt a little less like a live wire right now, and he wanted to do something to make this better. _Anything_.

"They're gonna be okay," he said softly.

Allura blinked at him, surprised.

"Really." It was hard to say, but he said it, even if he had to look away. "We can trust them. They're smart, they're strong, and they won't give up. Pidge and Hunk can think their way out of just about anything, and Shiro…how many times has he escaped the Galra now?"

"A lot," Allura said, softly.

Keith didn't know the exact number either, so he smiled. It came out a little twisted and sad, but he thought for right now, that was okay. "Yeah. They're gonna get out, they're gonna be fine, and when they get back you can reprimand them for making us worry, and everything will be back to normal."

It was harder than he'd thought to admit he was worried, even obliquely. And yet…now that he'd said it out loud, it was a little easier to believe what he'd said. They'd figure something out; they'd be okay, and they'd get back. They were his teammates, and he had to believe in them. He thought if Shiro were here right now, he'd be telling Keith something like that.

Allura smiled slightly. "You're right. Thank you, Keith."

He didn't know how to answer that, so he just nodded, and they stared together out the helm windows, waiting to hear from their friends.


	27. Restart (Keith & Coran)

**A/N: This chapter follows "Depose."**

* * *

" _Coran!"_

In theory, Coran had known this could happen. It was supposed to happen, in fact—it had been part of their agreement. If something went wrong with the castle-ship's systems, Keith was supposed to come get Coran right away.

But nothing had happened to interrupt his break from watching the ship's systems for the past dozen times Keith had relieved him, and Coran had begun letting himself slip into the deepest and most regenerative sleep of which he was capable in a relatively short time frame. He'd gotten attached without realizing it. He should have known better.

He'd reflexively bolted upright when Keith had come in, fumbling to get his feet under him and get into a fight-ready stance. Now he half-fell back onto his bed, brain still stuttering into gear after the rude awakening. "What's going on?" he managed.

Keith was panting, and his words stumbled over each other. "I messed up, I don't know what happened, I just—"

"Calm down, paladin," Coran said automatically. Young recruits would be the death of him, always raring to go at odd hours and not letting a man blink the sleep from his eyes. He powered up his remote console and pulled up the ship's diagnostic, scanning it with the ease of long practice. "Let me just take a look at what the problem…Oh. Ah."

"…Ah?" Keith blinked at him, wide-eyed.

"Not your fault," Coran said firmly. "No worries. I've just got to, uh, go fix this particular little issue before it tears the primary engines apart!"

He was out of the darkened room like a shot, heading full-tilt towards the engine room. He felt almost back to his normal self: the ship was about five minutes from exploding, which nowadays was pretty much just business as usual. It had been ten thousand years since he wasn't in charge of preventing that from happening, and right this second it actually felt like it.

"How can possibly that not be my fault?" Keith demanded, following. "That sounds _really bad!_ "

The human had to be stepping up his training, to be keeping up with him at this pace. That, or he hadn't shaken the last of the sleep off. (He refused to consider the possibility that he wasn't as quick as he'd been ten thousand one hundred years ago.)

"It's a tricky little subroutine that's been overloading the fuel relays every few of your earth weeks," Coran admitted. "It's simple enough to restart the three parent routines, but the timing takes a fine touch, so I haven't been able to automate it. You tried to reroute the systems when there was a structural integrity alert, didn't you?"

"Yes." Keith sounded surprisingly guilty about that. Was this the secret side of a paladin who demanded nothing less than excellence from himself and his team?

They made it to the elevator, its doors open and waiting for them, and threw themselves inside.

"Hang on!" Coran said firmly. Keith caught hold of the lift's handles automatically, responding to the note of command in Coran's voice. Coran double-checked that he had a solid grip—humans were fragile, and he was responsible for this one—and then keyed in his engineering override and some quick-and-dirty coefficient adjustments.

Keith yelped as the elevator suddenly started descending a _lot_ faster than usual. Coran hooked his elbow around one of the other hand-holds, then went back to remote damage control as best he was able.

"I'm going to need your help to fix this," he said as he worked. "A manual power-cycle is the best way of going about it. Another set of eyes will be invaluable."

" _What if I mess up again?_ "

Coran blinked at the words, barely audible over the heightened buzz of their descent but still intensely earnest. He looked Keith over, seeing how he'd shrunk back against the wall, how anxious he looked. This was not the confident, self-assured paladin he was used to seeing. The late hour, perhaps? Or the absence of certain other younglings in the room to keep up his arrogant façade?

Or maybe Keith, who seemed go over any possible scenario multiple times before facing it whenever he had the chance, didn't do well with unexpected difficulties.

Regardless, it wouldn't do. He wasn't going to stand for this. "You didn't 'mess up' a first time," he assured Keith briskly. "And I expect you to keep a level head, paladin. You said you'd be my assistant, didn't you? Well, assist!"

The lift was beginning to slow, the drop in acceleration nearly pulling Keith's feet off the floor. He kept them planted, face set in determination.

"Understood," he managed. The elevator stopped, and he launched himself out of it, hot on Coran's heels. "Just talk me through it."


	28. Corroborate (Hunk & Coran)

"Uh, guys? I have kind of a bad feeling about this."

It was the cue for everyone else to ignore him. Hunk _knew_ that, knew that if he didn't say it more assertively they'd just brush him off, but he wasn't sure and he didn't like to push. What if the next time, he really _was_ certain there was something wrong, and he used up his last chance this time? No, better not to risk it. He'd go on the record now, and then he wouldn't feel bad if everything really did go wrong later. There wasn't much more he could do, anyway.

The video transmission they'd found definitely pointed to a problem, sure. It seemed that the Galra were partway through conquering a nearby planet, setting up camps to keep the native population out of the way while they assessed the planet for…strip-mining? It was hard to tell. It seemed to be a skeleton crew leading the invasion, though, backed up by robots, which were relatively easy to beat. Team Voltron had faced bigger fleets than this one and come out victorious, so taking a short detour to help was the obvious choice.

To his surprise, though, Coran spared him a glance despite all that. "What do you mean, Hunk?"

"Well…" He'd started with just a feeling. He hadn't expected to be _asked_ , but immediately kicked his brain into overdrive, searching for what he'd already glimpsed. "This signal…it's too strong. There isn't even a good reason to have this be broadcast this far out in the first place, and—look! The compression's off, like the quality was amped up somewhere along the line. And the sound's too high for the distance from the camera, they cranked that up too." He took a breath. "It's a fake. Or a setup. Probably."

"Hmm." Squinting at the display, Coran fiddled with a couple of the controls. Allura was looking between him and Hunk, concerned, and the other paladins seemed…kind of confused, Hunk decided. But before they'd been two seconds from scattering to their lions, and now he could see they were starting to reconsider.

"I'm not sure I see what you're talking about…" Allura said doubtfully. "Why would they broadcast their atrocities on purpose for everyone to see? It doesn't make any sense."

"As bait, maybe," Shiro mused. "It's possible that there's already some unrest in this sector, and they're looking to draw it to the surface."

"Doesn't that seem a bit elaborate for the Galra?" Keith said, frowning. "They haven't exactly been subtle so far. Why would they bother with tricks when they have superior numbers?"

Coran froze the screen and looked up from the lines of numbers scrolling across his screen. "No, Hunk is quite right. This could be bad."

Then he took two steps and slapped Hunk on the back, making him flinch with surprise. "Good eye, paladin! We'll need to approach this carefully."

He could feel everyone's eyes on him, with surprise and admiration mixed more or less evenly. He felt his face growing hot with the attention and looked down at his feet, fidgeting.

"But they have _prisoners_ ," Pidge blurted, face intense. "Even if it is a trap, it'd be hard to fake something like that."

"I know." Hunk felt bad for holding them back, he really did, but this was important. "And if they really are destroying this planet, we should stop them. But it'd be a lot safer to find out what they're up to first, and go from there."

"That's correct." Allura's voice was firm. "All right, paladins, suit up. For this mission, our first goal will be reconnaissance." She nodded at Hunk, who met her gaze with a smile. "The better we know their plan, the better we'll be able to thwart it."


	29. Abhor (Hunk & Allura)

The trip to restock the castle-ship's larder, Allura had been pleased to hear, had gone perfectly smoothly. Hunk had been able to get some new ingredients, and Pidge had been waiting with Allura in the docking bay to go over some of the discounted antique equipment Coran had discovered from a local junk dealer. They'd gone off with their prize immediately, so she'd volunteered to help Hunk unload the rest of the supplies. Coran deserved a break from the grunt work every now and then, and a bit of light exercise had sounded appealing.

However, neither of them had counted on there being a stowaway aboard the pod.

Allura let out a most unladylike yelp when the dratted thing buzzed straight for her ear, bouncing off her head before circling a stack of crates.

Hunk jumped about a foot in the air at her shout. "What!?"

"A…" She traced the tip of her ear, searching for damage, but fortunately there seemed to be none. "Well, some sort of insect. It collided with my head."

Said insect was making a noise that, now that she'd noticed it, was impossible to ignore: a sort ascending and descending whine. It looked as though it might have a stinger of some sort, but there was no way to be certain without knowing more about the species. Allura glimpsed her mice taking cover in a nearby corner, the biggest shielding the others while tracking the intruder with angry eyes. She couldn't blame them; including the wingspan, the bug was about the size of the smallest of them.

"Oh. Wow. Uh." Hunk took several steps back, eyeing the thing warily. "How did that get in here?"

"I assume it stowed aboard while you were loading the pod," Allura said. "Did you really not notice it on the—"

She was interrupted by the thing flying straight at Hunk, who immediately began to panic. He doubled over, hands raised over his head. "Ahhh get it off get it off _get it off_ —"

She rushed over, hand raised. She wasn't exactly sure what she could do without hurting Hunk, but she was determined to try.

Luckily, she didn't have to; the thing flew off again a moment later. "It's all right, it's gone!" she said, grunting in disgust as she threw herself out of its path. It seemed to have no further interest in either of them after that, and landed without further ado on a nearby wall.

Allura spared a glance at Hunk. He was shuddering in disgust. Apparently he hated flying insects as much as she did.

"Ugh, that was the _worst_ ," Hunk said. "What is that thing's problem?"

"We need to kill it," Allura said firmly. "There's no knowing what mischief it could do to the ship's systems otherwise."

They stared at the bug together for a long moment.

"It's…not exactly in easy reach," Hunk said. "I don't suppose you could…?" He pantomimed getting taller with one hand.

"I…could…" Allura admitted. The truth was, though, she didn't want to.

She was being ridiculous. It was an insect a mere fraction of her size. She could kill it with a twist of her fingers. But even so, being stung was never pleasant—even if it was likely less dangerous to her than to a human—and something about Hunk's cringing had resonated with her. She didn't want that thing near her any more than he did, and she didn't particularly fancy angering the creature if she failed to kill it on her first try.

Besides, she had her hair down today. She already considered herself lucky that it hadn't gotten tangled in it the first time.

"…Maybe a bayard would be better?" Hunk said eventually. "Mine would be overkill, so I'll…I'll go get Keith. Or Lance, if I can't find Keith."

Shooting the thing with Lance's bayard wouldn't be much less overkill than Hunk's, but she'd take it. "Please do," Allura said shortly, eyes fixed on the spot the thing was currently occupying. It had begun to climb slowly further up the wall. "I'll keep an eye on it."

There was a hurried set of footsteps down the hall. Allura could hear the mice squeaking worriedly to each other, but she refused to be distracted. The last thing she wanted was to lose this dratted bug before it could be dealt with.

She heard two sets of footsteps coming back a few minutes later, but the voice that carried towards her wasn't one of the ones she'd been expecting.

"You want me to…what?" Shiro was saying to Hunk.

"I brought Shiro," Hunk said unnecessarily. Allura caught sight of black out of the corner of her eye.

She pointed. "Kill it."

"…Sure." A quick running head-start, and Shiro took two steps up the wall. The first shallow slice of his arm only took one set of wings off the insect; a downward slice delivered the killing blow, cutting the thing neatly in two. The halves smoked slightly as they fell to the floor.

Allura and Hunk breathed a combined sigh of relief.

"Thank you," she said. She forced herself to meet his gaze as she said it, holding on to the few remaining shreds of her dignity.

Shiro had a good poker face, but his polite smile didn't quite mask the amused glint in his eye. "Anytime."


	30. Leech (Pidge & Shiro)

As far as Pidge was concerned, sometimes long missions were good. It was nice to focus on just one thing at a time, not worry about the big picture. Everyone's normal schedule went out the window, and no one got told off for keeping odd hours. It was bad when some of the team got into trouble, of course, but when it came down to the five of them and a common enemy, it felt like everything in the universe was incredibly simple.

Afterwards, though, sometimes returning to routine was…kind of rough. Not a _problem_ , per se, but kind of a nuisance.

It was mostly the little things. Keith and Lance would decide to double up on their antagonism, for instance, each actively pretending the other didn't exist because they were irritated at how they'd actually gotten along. Hunk would get weirdly clingy for a day or two, poking at everything everyone else was doing, making the odd round to ensure everyone was sane and fed. Shiro kept a pretty even keel, but he got quieter after missions, too, and would keep to himself more than he already did in his downtime. It made it difficult to track him down if Pidge had a question.

And that was just during their free time. Pidge would be happy to just jump into another project or the next mission, but the team had a routine that Allura and Coran had set for them, and there was no getting out of it without some convenient crisis.

Piloting after missions usually went okay. Sometimes Pidge made stupid mistakes, but better to make them in training than in the field. During battle, it was fine to cut corners, or to do good enough; during their training, perfection was more of a focus. Plus, forming Voltron during training felt…a bit different. If not for the mind-meld training they still did on a semi-regular basis, Pidge wouldn't have been able to place it.

Because of that, though, it was easy. With Coran's telepathic headsets, every little detail could be visualized. There was an echo of the adrenaline rush that came with forming Voltron, but with nowhere near the same intensity as would occur in a real battle setting. Instead, it was just calm, focus, and trying to keep everyone's thoughts out of everyone else's heads.

At least, that was how it always went for Pidge. Maybe it was different for the others, but there was so much _noise_. Keith and Lance were especially bad at shutting up, and Hunk, even when he was focused, was inclined to start muttering. Pidge had grown used to the sensations of errant thoughts throwing people off-track. Before, such moments had broken the connection for the person having such thoughts, pulling all of them out of Voltron. Now, moments of distraction could send one paladin halfway into another's thought process.

They never wore the sets for more than about ninety minutes at a time, and Coran always watched them. But for Pidge, by the end of those sessions, it still somehow ended up feeling like something had gotten sprained inside. There was no point complaining—it was an important part of training, and the improvement they'd made together was impossible to miss—but it was still the worst part of returning to routine. It took all the scratchy little details of being stuck with each other and turned them up to eleven, everyone else's thoughts rattling around in Pidge's head when they were least expected.

Today was worse than usual. Shiro kept having half-formed thoughts that veered dark and then stopped dead, boxed in by the metal sides of his lion. Hunk's chatter poked and prodded at all of them in turn, just on the edges of hearing. Lance kept flashing them little bits and pieces of _home_ , unintentional moments of homesick memories that made the rest of them flinch back. Keith responded to the rest of their attitudes especially badly, controlling every aspect of his transformed virtual lion down to the last screw and making coordination more difficult for the rest of them.

In front of them, Voltron began to flicker. Shiro's muted shockwave of self-doubt was the last straw.

Despite Pidge's best effort, some of their irritation leaked through. A strong blast of _would you_ stop? echoed through the others' headsets, enough to set Voltron's left arm rattling in its fixture. Pidge jumped internally and rushed to fix the damage. By the time the green lion was stable again…

…It was a feeling unlike any that Pidge had experienced in the previous sessions. Suddenly, there was—surprise, mostly, and a little bit of…was that pride? Directed at…

Huh. It was like a two-way street, suddenly. Every emotion Pidge felt was reflected at odd angles with the others, changing flavor before making its way back. It was frightening, and Pidge wanted to jump behind the walls that had apparently been shielding them before, but it wasn't as bad as Pidge had feared, not as invasive. Better still, the thoughts-behind-thoughts—the dark ones, the ones like scary stories on the edge of Pidge's hearing—these new sensations drowned those out a little bit. They didn't build up in the corners of Pidge's mind as they had, but bounced in and out again, along with the others' voices and movements.

Pidge hadn't managed to open up quite like this before, hadn't been able to project personality alongside tactics and planning. It made the exercise more like a conversation, and less like spying and being spied upon in turn.

There was no time in the maze of coordination to worry about any one of the others, but that was a relief; it made it easier to focus on them-as-a-group, breathe through it and fight against the moments of friction that had their thoughts scattering in different directions. It felt _right_. It felt like a breakthrough.

In the center of the circle, Voltron grew more opaque.

"Oh, nicely done!" Coran called, clapping. "Remember what you're feeling now. I think you've got it!"

 _Yeah,_ Pidge thought, startled. _I think I do._

Shiro caught Pidge in the hallway after practice was over. Pidge was a little worried—it was obvious they'd been holding the team's training back, now that the obstacle was removed—but he just gripped Pidge's shoulder. "Well done," he said. "I know it wasn't easy."

Pidge thought of dark-tinted thoughts fighting to escape from a maze of walls and mirrors, and nodded. "Thanks." _You too_ , they thought of adding, but didn't.

The headsets were off now, so there was no way Shiro could've heard it. Still, though, for a moment before he turned away, the look on his face made Pidge wonder.


	31. Exhilarated (Allura & Coran)

When she was a child, Allura had once gone on a boating trip with her parents. It was a rare and very enjoyable time, given how busy the King and Queen usually were. They'd traveled on foot, dodging inclement weather and talking and laughing the whole time. And the boating itself had been the best part—good old-fashioned struggle against the elements, with only their muscle and their wits to back them up. There weren't many chances to try things like that in the palace, and she was eager to try it.

Allura had been old enough that she really was able to help, and young enough that she was prone to overestimating her own abilities. That had probably contributed to her getting knocked overboard halfway through their trip.

Her parents had gotten her out almost immediately, her mother scolding furiously and her father faintly amused behind his concern, but she'd never quite forgotten how easy it had felt to be carried away by a force bigger and stronger than her, joyfully _itself_ and utterly indifferent to her fate.

She felt that again, tenfold, when she replenished the Balmera. Much of the quintessence had come from the castle's reserves, of course, but she was responsible for the castle now, and much of it had been hers once. No small part of the total came from her own power, there, in that moment, fueled by her desire to save not only the great creature but the host of smaller creatures that depended on it for survival. They were trapped just as surely as the Balmera was, and she was not going to let any of them fall, not when she could save them.

Still, though, nothing had ever pushed her that far. She'd willed herself to expel every bit of energy that she could, had shaken herself loose and let the current of power take away almost everything she had. The Balmera needed more than she could give, in truth, and she'd spared no possible expenditure.

She'd thought that her own natural survival instinct would force her to keep more in reserve than she needed, and thus pushed herself to the edge. But then, near the end of the transfer, she realized she'd made a dangerous miscalculation. She _wanted_ , every part of her, to continue, to maximize the Balmera's chance for survival. She wanted to save them more than she wanted to live. Besides…dying this way would be easy, part of her whispered and if she died in her attemptm no one could say she'd done anything less than her duty—not even if she failed.

She had so many fears for such thoughts to prey on, and all of them only strengthened her determination to give it all, to hold nothing back.

But that was wrong. In that moment, she could feel the kindness of the Balmera and its people; none of them wished for her to sacrifice herself for their sake.

And there were others who needed her. She would be doing a wonderful thing, if she saved these people, but as big as that scope was, she'd set her sights on saving the _universe_. She couldn't do that if she gave everything now.

So she reached into herself and held onto the bits that mattered—herself, her memories, her desire to survive and do even greater things tomorrow. She let quintessence flow through her, but did not allow herself to be carried away by it. She was a stone in the flow of a river, not a child carried along by it. She _would_ hold.

Even with her determination, her awareness of the danger, she almost didn't make it. When the connection broke, and she crumpled, she was more than a little surprised that she'd survived. She was grateful for Shay's support, because there was no way she could have held herself up. It was all she could do to speak and stay aware of the things around her. All of her was numb and tingling.

The excitement with the monster was almost enough for her to forget herself for a little while, but her body was telling her in no uncertain terms that it couldn't sustain even that much. Coran switched from hovering to hands-on involvement around the time that she realized she couldn't even pretend to support her own weight anymore.

When he came in close to take over from Shay, she wrapped both arms around his neck and draped her head forward, balancing the dead weight of her torso as evenly as she could. He followed her lead and scooped up her legs with one arm, the other holding her close against his chest.

Shay stepped back politely, but she was frowning. "Princess, are you well?"

This, in turn, alarmed the paladins, who all came over in a rush, surrounding Coran. She was reminded of a flock of cygnosets, curious and clingy and poking at everything. They were sweet, but she was so tired.

"I'm fine," she protested. "I just—"

"You need rest, Princess," Coran interjected. He'd been so very patient with her so far, but she could feel him itching to bolt back with her to the castle right then, never mind explanations. "The ceremony exhausted you badly. It may take a while for you to recover."

"You're right," she said. She felt him stiffen a bit, surprised that she'd agreed. She turned to Shay, managing a small smile. "I'm glad you and your people are all right. I must take my leave now, but Voltron's paladins will do what they can to help the rest of your people construct routes to the surface." Shiro stepped forward, looking concerned, but she waved off his protests. "No, you stay. The lions could prove very useful."

"The ship _is_ right here," Coran noted. "You'll be well within hailing distance if we need you."

Shiro considered that, face grave, and then nodded. "Okay. Take care, then. We'll see what we can do here."

It was all the permission Coran needed to rush her back to the ship. The surface of the planet was uneven with blue crystals, but his steps were smooth and sure as he got them into a lift and keyed in one-handed instructions.

There was no more need to appear composed. Allura rested her head on Coran's shoulder. "Where are we going?" she murmured.

"I'm not sure the pods would work at the moment," he admitted. "The castle's power reserves are at a minimum—they'll need some time to replenish themselves. We're going to your room."

Allura sighed. "Good."

The last of the excitement had drained away, and in its place fine tremors were running through her body, starting at her spine and radiating outwards. They made her feel unsteady, and she tried to return Coran's grip, but failed. The world around her kept bending at odd angles. She felt like she was coming apart at the seams.

Coran, meanwhile, had managed to get her to her room and was settling her on her bed, pulling the covers aside and fluffing up pillows. He made to lay her down, but pressed on his wrist, and he stopped.

"What's wrong?" he asked. His face was grave.

"I…I don't know." Thinking in straight lines was difficult, but she knew there was something she wanted to say. "I saved them, Coran. I saved everyone."

"You did, Princess." Coran took both of her hands in his and squeezed. "What you did was incredible. Your father would be so proud."

It hurt to think about that, because her father wasn't here right now to tell her that himself. He was only a few halls away, but right now it made all the difference. "You were right. It almost killed me."

When Coran's hands tightened again, she knew it wasn't just for her benefit. "Yes," he murmured. "Yes, it did."

"It…wasn't as frightening as I'd imagined it might be," she admitted. She was shaking all over now, but she couldn't tell if it was a result to expended energy or some form of delayed emotional reaction. Probably it was a little of both.

"Well, that isn't so surprising," Coran demurred. "You're braver than you know, Princess."

She leaned against him harder, as tears came to join the shaking. "It's cold."

Knowing what it was she was still too proud to ask for directly, he wrapped her in a tight, warm hug. He was shaking now, too, and his breathing told her that he was starting to cry himself.

"Thank you, Coran," she choked out. "For believing in me, for taking care of me—all of it. Thank you so much."

"You're welcome," he answered, voice shaking. "Princess, I am so, so glad you're going to be okay."

Her answer was half-laugh, half-sob. "Me, too."


	32. Repair (Hunk & Allura)

**A/N:** **This one follows "Tug." Also, minor spoilers for the second issue of the comic (like literally a single panel).**

* * *

Hunk edged into the control room, watching Allura go over scans of the rock slide where his lion was currently trapped, mostly inoperative. He knew it was probably better to let her work in peace, but she'd been working for a couple of hours now without saying anything, and he _really_ wanted to know what was up.

"So…how's it going?" he ventured.

If Allura was surprised, she didn't show it. She took a moment to step away from the screen, shaking out her shoulders where they'd grown tight. "You were right to call in backup," she said frankly. "This slide is tricky…it's going to take some careful maneuvering to get your lion out with as little damage as possible."

"Huh." He edged closer, peering at the controls. She didn't bat him away, so he leaned in closer. "Is it still down for the count?"

"More or less," she said. "There isn't much it can do without its pilot's direction, but even if it was safe for you to return to it, it will need outside help to avoid starting a chain reaction. We're working on landing the castle-ship, but most of the terrain around here is too unstable to support its weight."

That was…really a problem. Hunk swallowed, looking at the footage of his lion in the corner. The tip of its snout and one eye were just visible through the wreckage.

"I shouldn't have left it behind," he lamented. "How are we even gonna get it out? Man. I really am the worst pilot."

Allura stopped, then turned to him, concerned. "Who told you that?"

"Nobody had to tell me." He shrugged. "I think it's pretty obvious."

"No, it isn't." She was starting to glare now. "Who's been _saying_ it?"

"…Well…" Hunk blinked, then slouched further. "Keith did mention it this one time…"

Allura's glare sharpened into a blade of ice. Hunk backtracked. "He didn't actually mean it! He just said it was something I always say. Which I do. Sometimes."

"Still, he should never have repeated it," Allura said severely.

"…Yeah, well, he was trying to get back at Lance. Not one of his best moments."

"I'm not going to argue with you there." Allura sighed. "Those two…you're not the worst pilot, Hunk. Voltron doesn't _have_ a worst pilot. There's no reason to think of it that way."

"I think I kind of am," he protested, gesturing to the screen. "Look at this. How many of us have gotten their lions caught in a rock slide? I had to abandon ship and get rescued by Lance and the others."

"Only after you saved them first. Or did you forget the part where you gave the others time to get away?"

"That was just because I couldn't clear out as fast as them." Hunk shook his head, frustrated. "I didn't do it on purpose."

"Your lion isn't built for maneuverability," she told him firmly. Like she really thought he hadn't done anything wrong, which was strange, given how much trouble he'd caused. "It's built to do a great deal of damage, and take a great deal of damage in turn. That means it's not exactly designed for subtlety, but it still takes a great deal of skill to use it to its best advantage."

"Yeah, maybe. If you count the skill of being too dumb to get out of the way." He'd been trying for humor with that last line, but he knew by the time he'd finished it that it had fallen flat. He just sounded sorry for himself—not a good look on anybody, especially not him.

But Allura seemed unbothered by this, shaking her head. "Hunk. I've watched you on the battlefield," she said matter-of-factly. "When you realize your friends need help, you don't hesitate—you jump right in. And you stay right in the middle of everything, even when you know you're going to take a hit. You don't flinch."

"I…" Did he really? He flinched so much the rest of the time, he hadn't really noticed.

"The yellow lion _needs_ that kind of stability to perform to its best potential," Allura continued. "Sometimes that may mean that you need help a little later on, but that isn't a failure, because you already succeeded in protecting the ones who are going to help you in turn."

"…Huh. So, you're saying it's a teamwork thing?"

Allura smiled. "Exactly. I'm glad you understand. Now—I could use some of your engineering capabilities here. You might see something that I'd overlooked, and the yellow lion is yours, after all."

He had to admit, he was itching to get in on solving this problem. "Okay," he said. "Might as well take a look."

* * *

 **A/N:** **That exchange between Lance, Keith, and Hunk really did happen in the second issue of the comic. As character moments go, it worked pretty well, but _wow_ was it frustrating. **


	33. Importance (Pidge & Lance)

"Hey, Pidge."

"What do you want?" Not the most diplomatic of answers, maybe. But there was no reason for Lance to be impinging on Pidge's space at the moment, and he had a happy-go-lucky air about him that spelled mischief.

"Just to see what you were up to."

"Working," Pidge said flatly.

"Well, I can see that." Lance leaned against a nearby wall. "Well, don't let me interrupt you. I'll let you get to a stopping point."

Pidge severely doubted that, but bent back to their screen anyway.

Two minutes of silence, Lance managed. It was a bit less than Pidge had estimated, but having him fidgeting on the edge of their vision was already distracting, so they didn't really mourn the lost time.

"…I was just wondering if you were planning to take a break," Lance said. "You know, soonish. And if you maybe wanted to hang out then."

Pidge pushed up their glasses, looking him over. "Why me?"

"It's your turn," Lance said simply. "Everybody on this ship is a workaholic. I'm the only one around here who remembers that relaxing is important, too. So, I'm makin' the rounds to make sure you all don't go crazy."

Pidge raised an eyebrow. "Really."

"Yep." Lance nodded, hand on one hip, then grinned. "I did some experimenting with Hunk yesterday, and we figured out how to adapt the food goo into whipped cream!" He paused, making a face. "Well, sorta. It wasn't quite up to standard to feed everyone else, but it was still a good time."

"Huh." It seemed possible that Hunk might disagree with that assessment, though they were sure he wouldn't admit it if he did. Lance and Hunk were best friends, and Pidge got that, but Lance could probably stand to be a little less overbearing to Hunk every now and then. The guy took it in stride most of the time, but still.

"So, I was thinking we could hang out, too, since it seems like you're just down here all the time. Do you ever, y'know, do anything for fun?"

Pidge returned to their keyboard, glare sheeting over the lenses of their glasses. "Coding _is_ fun."

Lance frowned. "I mean other than that."

"What do _you_ do?" Pidge asked, suddenly curious. Sure, they were in a space castle, but first and foremost it was a military base. There wasn't much in the way of readily identifiable entertainment.

"Well, I've got my music, and there's some other Altean gadgets lying around. I've been figuring out what those do." Lance shrugged. "Plus, if you ask the computer reeeeally nicely, you can get it to translate some of the books in the archives."

Pidge blinked at him. "You read books."

Lance flapped one hand, dismissive. "Pshh, of course."

"For fun."

"It's all a matter of finding the good ones. And spicing them up a little. Military history can be pretty cool, if you get into it." He waggled his eyebrows. "And I'm pretty sure I found the _romance novels_."

Pidge looked at him with heavily lidded eyes. "Yeah, not interested."

"Boo." Lance sat down cross-legged behind Pidge and craned his neck to see what they were up to. "Seriously, Pidge, you can't just hole up in your lab _all_ the time. Don't you get bored?"

"I think you're the one who's bored."

"Pidge, seriously. We are in a castle in the middle of space, fighting against an _evil empire_. How could I possibly be bored?"

Pidge ticked off on their fingers. "Well, Hunk's an engineer-slash-mechanic, Keith trains in his free time, I code, Shiro's the leader, and Coran and Allura are grown-ups—well, technically at least in Allura's case, who knows how Altean age works." Pidge shrugged. "My point is, everyone's busy. Are you actually trying to get us to 'relax'? 'Cause it seems to me like maybe you're just lonely."

"What? Don't be ridiculous." But Lance didn't say anything further to refute the statement, instead falling silent and watching as Pidge traced back a few more holes in their algorithm and started filling them in, almost by rote at this point. They could probably stand to build a smarter IDE, they thought absently, and added the task to a list before they could forget.

If that was the best non-rebuttal Lance could come up with, Pidge realized as they hit a brainstorming lull, he probably—almost definitely— _was_ lonely. Which wasn't too surprising under the circumstances. Lance was closest to Hunk, but didn't share his academic hobbies. Training with Keith would probably be the easiest activity to pick up, but he didn't _like_ Keith, and Keith wasn't the patient type anyway. The others were all busy, too, with things Lance didn't have the right skills to help with.

"Did you try bugging Shiro about this yet?" Pidge wondered aloud. If he had, they wished they could be a fly on that wall. Shiro would readily shut Lance down if he got too annoying, but out of all of them, he could probably use a chance to unwind the most.

"Well, I say 'rounds'…" Lance sighed, shrugged. "More like I bugged Hunk yesterday and didn't want to push my luck twice in a row. So you're second on the roster."

"Is that so. You do realize what I do is important, right?"

"Obviously. But you still deserve a break every now and then." The next part was more of a mutter, and Pidge wasn't entirely sure they were supposed to hear it. "Heck, if I need a break from doing nothing sometimes, the rest of you have to need a break from doing all the big important things you're doing."

If he was saying stuff like that out loud, Lance was probably more down than Pidge was used to seeing. It made Pidge feel uncomfortably sorry for him. Worse, it made it easy to think about all the stuff Pidge would themself have time to think about, if they didn't have an endless list of tasks waiting for them in the castle's computer and communication systems. Which, in turn, just made them feel more genuinely worried about Lance, instead of just pitying him. It was hard not to, while imagining how desperate they'd probably feel like in his place.

Unlike Lance, they doubted they'd be as proactive about fixing it, either.

Pidge sighed, typed in a few notes about what to get back to later, and shut off the screen. "Fine," they said, pretending to be more annoyed than they really were. (From the look on Lance's face, he already saw through the ruse, but Pidge had a reputation to maintain.) "What did you have in mind?"


	34. Clump (Lance & Shiro)

**A/N: Follows "Cuddling."**

* * *

"I don't care what Coran told you," Lance said Shiro flatly over his shoulder before huddling back into Hunk. "We should've worn our suits."

The five of them were shivering even under their blankets, up on the highest parapet of the castle, the clear night sky a magnificent tapestry over their heads. Coran had brought three telescopes along with the blankets—fully analog, clearly antique, but nevertheless of excellent make. Pidge had attached themself to one immediately, leaving the others to share the second while Coran and Allura passed the third between them.

The trouble was, without their suits, it was too cold to enjoy the view for very long, and Coran didn't seem inclined to let them back downstairs any time soon.

Shiro stood behind the others, keeping an eye on them and the night sky all at once. It was beautiful, but the view down below was starting to wear a little bit. Lance had gravitated to Hunk for warmth almost immediately, but he had yet to go two minutes without complaining. Pidge was starting to look sluggish, even, curled into a small ball with only one hand out to adjust the telescope, suppressing shudders because it would distort their view. Keith sat off to one side, staring expressionless at the expanse of stars overhead. Shiro knew him, though; the way his limbs were drawn together meant he was unhappy that everyone else was unhappy. He just wasn't planning to do anything about it, other than quietly suffer through it.

Coran, ever patient, was watching them like he was taking notes on their progress. He'd intended them to be doing more cuddling, Shiro knew, but this wasn't as simple as handcuffing them to each other to make them eat. He'd clearly had something more voluntary in mind.

It was Hunk that spoke first. "Okay, seriously, Pidge, it hurts to look at you right now." He gestured at his free side. "Get over here."

"...Yeah, okay." Pidge curled up next to Hunk, shivering. "But you've got to see this, it's awesome. I think I found a supernova—or a nebula. Both, maybe."

"Sure, yeah, in a minute." Hunk wrapped a careful arm around Pidge, and to Shiro's surprise, Pidge went obediently limp, burrowing into his side for warmth. Their lips were paler than Shiro would have liked. Hunk half-smiled down at them, chafing gently at their outer arm.

"It is _so_ cold," Lance said for about the twentieth time on Hunk's other side. Then he looked over his shoulder, petulant. "Shiro, I bet you're like a space heater. Get over here."

Hunk looked up from Pidge, frowning. "I thought I was your space heater."

"And you're great at it!" Lance reassured him. "But I'm sharing you with Pidge, so you only cover one side. I need two."

Pidge reached out and felt Lance's upper arm, making him yelp. "Lance, you're not even that cold. You seem pretty warm to me, actually."

"It doesn't matter! I _feel_ cold. If I stop feeling cold, it's already too late. Boom. Hypothermia. Frostbite."

That was taking things a bit far, Shiro reflected, but it did get the point across. This wasn't some sort of stoic test of wills—or at least, he didn't think Coran had meant it as such. It was supposed to be a shared experience, and sharing body heat as well would make it a great deal more pleasant.

Lance seemed to see where his thoughts were going. "Please?" he said, one eyebrow raised like he wasn't sure begging would work. His puppy-dog eyes were particularly impressive since he didn't seem to be doing them entirely on purpose.

Still, Shiro hesitated. It didn't feel quite right, somehow—part of him balked at something in this. The informality of it, maybe, how unnecessary it seemed. Besides, he was supposed to be their _leader_. This wasn't exactly the most dignified of activities, and in a pinch he needed them to be able to rely on him.

(It was a silly reason, but it distracted him from deeper fears. He didn't want to think about the others' proximity to his scars; the nagging worry, deep down where he couldn't quite exorcise it, that his arm would activate out of the blue and hurt one of them; deeper still, terror at the thought of letting his guard down, only for something horrible to happen as a result…)

But in the end, there was no _good_ reason not to follow Lance's suggestion. This was his team, and even if he was their leader, they were also friends. And none of them seemed too bothered about his arm or his scars. He could relax around them. He could even get close to them. It was allowed.

He edged into Hunk's and Lance's orbit on Lance's other side, carefully folding himself down cross-legged at an angle. He used his metal arm to drape a handful of blankets that Hunk handed to him over Lance's shoulder. Lance pulled him in close enough to Hunk that he was squashed tight between the two of them, and let out a happy sigh.

Shiro took one deep, slow, unobtrusive breath. Another. Nothing looked like it was going badly. He could feel the tension in Lance's back diminishing gradually, presumably as he warmed.

There was a moment of silence as they all felt the pockets of air between them begin to heat up, insulated by the blankets. To Shiro's surprise, Allura knelt behind him, half on the blankets, staring up at the sky. On Hunk's other side, Coran took up a similar place, resting a hand on Pidge's and Hunk's shoulders.

Shiro glanced up at the sky overhead. It was a lot more enjoyable now, but one nagging concern kept tugging his gaze downward.

"Keith," Hunk said finally, breaking the silence. Apparently he'd resigned himself to the idea that nobody else was going to say it. "C'mon, man. Cuddle pile means you too."

"Oh. Right. Yeah." Keith didn't seem surprised so much as distracted. Still, he unfolded himself readily enough, a bit stiff but not shaking. He edged carefully around Lance to find a place on Pidge's other side. When he gestured, Lance grudgingly passed him a blanket behind Hunk's back.

As he did so, one of Keith's arms brushed Lance's under the blankets, and Lance flinched dramatically, almost dislodging Shiro. "Keith, you're a freaking _ice cube,_ what the heck?"

Keith shrugged. "Sorry."

"Darn straight, get away from me!"

"Ignore Lance, he's just being dramatic—" Pidge bit back a yelp and clambered over to sit between Hunk's legs instead, giving up their former spot without protest. "Cold hands cold hands _cold hands!_ "

"Now who's being dramatic?" Keith shot back, but Shiro noticed that he stuck his hands carefully under his arms before leaning against Hunk.

Hunk, for his part, winced a bit at first, but he threw his blanket over Keith nonetheless. "You know, they kinda weren't kidding," he said.

Keith rolled his eyes. "It's not that bad."

"It's a little that bad," Hunk disagreed, but left it at that. He didn't chafe at Keith like he had at Pidge, but Shiro saw Keith's breathing deepen and his face gradually gain a bit of color as he absorbed some of Hunk's heat. Apparently Keith _was_ sensitive to the cold, though perhaps he wasn't consciously aware of it. Shiro took note of that in case it arose as a problem later.

This was better—having everyone within easy reach as well as within sight felt surprisingly good. Shiro squeezed Lance's shoulder a bit and caught a hint of a grin on his face in reply. He felt himself settle, and turned his gaze back to the stars.

* * *

 **A/N:** **It's getting to a busy time of year, between Inktober and NaNo, so I think I'm going to place this story on hiatus for now. I'll probably come back to it when season two comes out, if not earlier. Thank you so much to everyone who's read, reviewed, and faved this story! It means a lot to me. Happy autumn, everybody.**


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